The Kremlin’s crackdown on opposition activists, independent journalists and ordinary Russians critical of the regime has intensified after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has been issued an arrest warrant in absentia by a court in Russia.
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court ruled to arrest her on charges of alleged involvement in an extremist group, five months after her husband died in a Russian Arctic penal colony.
Navalnaya has publicly held Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for Navalny’s death, which Russian authorities say became ill after a walk but have otherwise given no further details.
Russian officials have denied involvement in Navalny’s poisoning and death.
Since then, Yulia Navalnaya has been living abroad in an undisclosed location with her two children.
Responding to the court order, Navalanya told her supporters on X not to be distracted by it and to instead press on with their campaign against Putin.
“When you write about this, please don’t forget to write the main thing: Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal,” Navalnaya posted on the social media platform.
“His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague, in a cosy cell with a TV, but in Russia — in the same (penal) colony and the same two-by-three metre cell in which he killed Alexei.”
Alexei Navalny was Putin’s fiercest political opponent, and he died while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he had rejected as politically motivated.
He was imprisoned after returning to Moscow in January 2021 from Germany, where he had been recuperating from the 2020 nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
