Yulia Navalnaya, Kremlin critic’s heroic wife, to attend EU foreign policy meeting

Yulia Navalnaya, Kremlin critic’s heroic wife, to attend EU foreign policy meeting

Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who died in Russian custody, will attend the EU foreign affairs council on Monday, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Sunday. For many years, Navalnaya insisted she had no interest in getting into politics, but since Navalny’s death on Friday, she appears to haver turned into her husband’s torchbearer.

“On Monday, I will welcome Yulia Navalnaya at the EU Foreign Affairs Council. EU Ministers will send a strong message of support to freedom fighters in Russia and honour the memory of Alexi @navalny,”  Borrell said in a statement on X.

The announcement came days after Navalnaya electrified an audience of leaders, diplomats and officials at the Munich Security Council when she delivered an impromptu address on Friday just hours after reports of her husband’s death emerged.

Teary-eyed but stoic, Navalnaya emphasised that she had no confirmation as yet about her husband’s death. But she was certain of her message.

“If this is true, then I want [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and all his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know: they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband,” she said.

“And this day will come very soon,” said the 47-year-old Russian widow, her hair secured in a signature tight bun.

Navalnaya said she had weighed whether to address the gathering or rush out of the conference to be with the couple’s two children, Daria and Zakhar. She decided her husband would want her to speak.

On Sunday, she was once again keeping her late husband in the spotlight, this time on a very personal note.

“I love you,” she said on Instagram in her first social media post since her husband’s death. The accompanying photo was a shot of her husband kissing her forehead at what appeared to be a music concert.

The couple’s love story was an inspiration for many Russian supporters of Navalny, presenting a stark contrast to Putin, his icy foe who reveals nothing about his personal life.

Navalny’s last message to the outside world was a Valentine’s Day note to his wife: “I feel that you are with me every second.”

A former banking clerk who gave up a job to look after her children, Navalnaya always insisted she was primarily a mother and a wife, with  uninterested in getting into politics. But circumstances may change that position as Russian opposition supporters contemplate a future without their charismatic leader.

‘I had to get him out’

The Munich speech was not the first time Navalnaya showed stoicism.

In summer 2020, she watched her husband almost die when he was poisoned in Siberia by what doctors said was a Soviet nerve agent.

She then managed to get him out of the country – as he lay in a coma with local doctors refusing to let him go — with the help of a German charity.

“Every moment when we were there, I thought ‘I had to get him out’,” Navalnaya told Russian filmmaker and blogger Yuri Dud in an interview during her husband’s recovery in Germany.

She said state doctors in Siberia were trying to drag out the process for him to either die or for the nerve agent not to be traceable.

Five months later, she was just as defiant when the couple flew back to Moscow, knowing it would land him in jail.

“Waiter, bring us some vodka, we’re flying home,” Navalnaya said in a video sitting next to Alexei on the plane, copying a scene from a Russian cult film.

The couple were separated at passport control upon landing, the last time she saw her husband free.

They briefly embraced before police took him away and she was greeted at the airport to chants of “Yulia!”.

‘Darkest things’

Navalnaya has described her life since as “letters, letters, letters”, saying she tried to write to her husband every day.

The two met on holiday in Turkey, with both saying they fell in love immediately.

Navalnaya gave up a job in banking to raise the couple’s children as Alexei’s political career took off.

As he recovered from the poisoning in Germany, Navalny joked that his wife’s views were more radical than his.

“When you are not a politician but you see the darkest things against your family then, of course, it radicalises you,” he said in the interview with Dud.

Since Navalny was imprisoned, Navalnaya has said she would not follow the path of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – who became Belarus’s opposition leader after her husband was jailed.

Tikhanovskaya met Navalnaya in Munich after Navalny’s death and   The pair symbolically hugged in Munich after.

“Yulia Navalnaya is becoming a political figure whether she wants it or not,” Russian political commentator Tatiana Stanovaya said on social media the day Navalny died.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)