"My husband was killed by Putin."
Alexei Navalny's widow points the finger without hesitation at the Kremlin, suggesting that his death may have been induced with the use of Novichok, the nerve agent that already appeared in the previous poisoning of the opponent in 2020. And in a video released on social media she announces that she is ready to take up her husband's political legacy, on the very day he lands in Brussels to participate in the Council of Foreign Ministers of the EU.
Meanwhile, Navalny's mother, reported the dissident's former spokesperson Kira Yarmysh, was told that the body will not be returned to the family for another 14 days, during which unspecified "chemical tests" must be carried out.
Yarmysh added that the same mother and the opponent's lawyer were prevented in the morning for the second time in three days from entering the hospital morgue in the
Arctic city of Salekhard where, according to the Russian opposition website Mediazona, the body would have been brought already in the late evening of February 16, the day of death in the IK-3 penal colony.
According to Yulia Navalnaya, whose eight-minute video immediately went viral, these postponements confirm that the authorities are "lying pettily while waiting for the traces of yet another Putin's Novichok to fade away."
A reference to the poisonous substance implicated in attacks suffered in the past by Navalny and other opponents, such as the one in Great Britain in 2018 against the former Russian spy who had defected, Serghei Skripal, and her daughter.
But then Navalnaya made it clear that she was still not certain about the method used: "We will certainly find out who exactly and in what precise way carried out the crime, we will name the names and show the faces", she promised.
The organization for the legal protection of prisoners Ovd-Info has launched an online petition to ask for the prompt delivery of the body to the family and said it has already collected over 60,000 signatures.
But when asked to respond to the family's request, Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the Kremlin has no jurisdiction in the matter.
"The investigation is ongoing and all necessary actions are being taken in this regard", assured the spokesperson, judging the accusations made against Putin by Western countries as "crude".
"These sentences, of course, cannot
cause any harm to our head of state, but they absolutely do not give a good image of those who make such
statements," Peskov further stated.
In her video message, Yulia Navalnaya therefore said she was ready to take up her husband's baton.
“I will continue his work, I will continue to fight for our country, and I invite you to stand beside me,” he said, adding that he wanted to build a Russia “as Alexei Navalny imagined it, full of dignity, justice and love.”
She was subsequently welcomed in Brussels by the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, who remembered the dissident as a "warrior" and condemned what he called "the brutality of the rogue Kremlin regime
".
For further information Agenzia ANSA The toxicologist, 'Novichok is a plausible hypothesis' - News - Ansa.it A Novichok agent to kill Alexei Navalny?
"Without having access to the body it is impossible to say," Sabina Strano-Rossi, associate professor in Forensic Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the Catholic University of Rome and pr... (ANSA) tells ANSA.
"Yulia Navalnaya is a woman who wants to continue fighting to defend freedom in her country and has reiterated that Russia is not Putin and Putin is not Russia", said Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani for his part.
The head of the Farnesina added that, on behalf of everyone, the high representative for foreign policy Josep Borrell "assured her that we will continue to support the right of expression in Russia, to be able to wage political battles and we will ask for the release of all political prisoners".
The Farnesina announced that, on Tajani's instructions, the chargé d'affaires in Russia, Pietro Sferra Carini, honored Navalny's memory by placing flowers in Moscow on the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to the victims of political repression, as they did other Western diplomats.
US President Joe Biden has announced that the United States is considering further sanctions against Russia over
Navalny's death.
While former president Donald Trump broke the silence on what happened, however, avoiding criticism of the Kremlin and interpreting it rather as a sign of the collapse of the United States itself: "Open borders, rigged elections, unjust court decisions are destroying America, we are a country in decline", argued Trump on his social network Truth.
Hungary's silence: 'Sanctions against Moscow are only a cosmetic solution'
"The European Union, suffering from war psychosis, only intends to obey Washington, the liberal media and NGOs by launching yet another package of sanctions" against Russia "certainly completely useless, which only serves as a cosmetic solution" in coinciding with the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine.
The Hungarian Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó, present at the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, wrote this on Facebook.
Budapest has so far blocked the approval of the thirteenth EU sanctions package.
Silence on Navalny's death, on which there was no reaction from Orban's government.
Berlin summons the Russian ambassador
The German Foreign Ministry announced that it had summoned the Russian ambassador today regarding the death of Alexei Navalny and the repression of protests by political opponents in Russia.
The spokesperson of the German Foreign Ministry announced this today in Berlin during the government press conference.
"The politically motivated proceedings against Alexei Navalny and many other critics of the Russian government" demonstrate the "brutality with which the Russian justice system acts against those who think differently and the means used by President Putin to suppress freedom of expression in Russia", said the spokeswoman for the German Foreign Ministry.
"We condemn all this in the strongest terms and expressly call for the release of all people imprisoned in Russia for political reasons," she added.
The German government also called on Russia to investigate the circumstances of Navalny's death and release his body to his family, as government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit stressed.
Latvia and Lithuania formally protest the death of the dissident
The Foreign Ministries of Latvia and Lithuania today summoned the chargés d'affaires of the embassies of the Russian Federation in Riga and Vilnius to express their protest over the death of Alexei Navalny.
During the meeting, representatives of the foreign ministries of the two Baltic countries underlined the need to clarify the circumstances of Navalny's death and expressed the hope that those responsible for the death of the Russian opponent will be brought to justice.
The Foreign Ministry in Vilnius also called for the immediate release of all the people arrested in Russia in recent days for having publicly paid tribute to Navalny.
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