Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia says she’ll stand as Russian President

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Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia says she’ll stand as Russian President

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Alexei Navalny and Yulia Navalnaya at a rally before the Moscow mayoral election in 2013

Yulia Navalnaya intends to be president of Russia, she tells me. She looks me straight in the eye. No hesitation or wavering.

This, like so many of the decisions she made with her husband, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is unambiguous.

Navalnaya knows she faces arrest if she returns home while President ****** is still in power. His administration has accused her of participating in extremism.

This is no empty threat. In Russia, it can lead to ******.

Her husband, President ******’s most vocal critic, was sentenced to 19 years for extremism, charges that were seen as politically motivated. He ***** in February in a brutal penal colony in the Arctic Circle. US President Joe Biden said there was “no doubt” ****** was to blame. Russia denies ******** Navalny.

Yulia Navalnaya, sitting down for our interview in a London legal library, looks and sounds every inch the successor to Navalny, the lawyer turned politician who dreamt of a different Russia.

As she launches Patriot, the memoir her husband was writing before his ******, Yulia Navalnaya restated her plans to continue his ****** for democracy.

When the time is right, “I will participate in the elections… as a candidate,” she told the BBC.

“My political opponent is Vladimir ******. And I will do everything to make his regime fall as soon as possible”.

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Yulia Navalnaya told the BBC’s Katie Razzall that her husband was a “real patriot”

For now, that has to be from outside Russia.

She tells me that while ****** is in charge she cannot go back. But Yulia looks forward to the day she believes will inevitably come, when the ****** era ends and Russia once again opens up.

Just like her husband, she believes there will be the chance to hold free and fair elections. When that happens, she says she will be there.

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Alexei, Yulia and their son Zakhar at a rally in Moscow in 2017, surrounded by police

Her family has already suffered terribly in the struggle against the Russian regime, but she ******** composed throughout our interview, steely whenever ******’s name comes up.

Her personal grief is channelled into political messaging, in public anyway. But she tells me, since Alexei’s ******, she has been thinking even more about the impact the couple’s shared political beliefs and decisions have had on their children, Dasha, 23, and Zakhar, 16.

“I understand that they didn’t choose it”.

But she says she never asked Navalny to change course.

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Yulia and Alexei with their children Zakhar and Dasha in Germany

He was barred from standing for president by Russia’s Central Election Commission.

His investigations through his Anti-*********** Foundation were viewed by millions online, including a video posted after his last arrest, claiming that ****** had built a one-billion dollar palace on the ****** Sea.

The president denied it.

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Navalny says the investigation into ‘******’s palace’ on the ****** Sea took months

Yulia says: “When you live inside this life, you understand that he will never give up and that is for what you love him”.

Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020.

He was flown to Germany for treatment and the ******* chancellor demanded answers from ******’s regime.

Navalny worked with open-source investigators Bellingcat and traced the poisoning to Russia’s security service, the FSB.

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In his memoir, Alexei says after he survived Novichok poisoning, Yulia made the “decisive observation” that he might be poisoned again, so it was important for him to get “physically fit”

He began writing his memoir as he recovered.

He and Yulia returned to Russia in January 2021 where he was arrested after landing.

Many ask why they returned.

“There couldn’t be any discussion. You just need to support him. I knew that he wants to come back to Russia. I knew that he wants to be with his supporters, he wanted to be an example to all these people with his courage and his bravery to show people that there is no need to be afraid of this dictator.

“I never let my brain think that he might be *******… we lived this life for decades and it’s about you share these difficulties, you share these views. You support him”.

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Navalny was asked by one of the journalists on his flight back to Russia in January 2021 whether he was “worried now” and he replied “no”

After his jailing, Navalny continued his book in notebook entries, posts on social media and prison diaries, published for the first time. Some of his writing was confiscated by the prison authorities, he said.

Patriot is revealing – and devastating. We all know Navalny’s final chapter, which makes the descriptions of his treatment – and his courage in the face of it – even more poignant.

Navalny spent 295 days in solitary confinement, punished, according to the book, for violations including the top button of his fatigues being unbuttoned. He was deprived of phone calls and visits.

Yulia Navalnaya told me: “Usually, the normal practice is banishment just for two weeks and it’s the most severe punishment. My husband spent there almost one year.”

In a prison diary from August 2022, Navalny writes from solitary confinement:

It is so hot in my cell you can hardly breathe. You feel like a fish tossed onto the shore, yearning for fresh air. Most often, though, it is like a cold, dank cellar….. It is invariably isolated, with loud music constantly playing. In theory, this is to prevent prisoners in different cells from being able to shout to each other; in practice, it is to drown out the screams of those being tortured.

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Alexei Navalny ***** in the IK-3 penal colony in the Arctic Circle on 16 February

Navalnaya says she was prevented from visiting or speaking to her husband for two years before he *****. She says Alexei was tortured, starved and kept in “awful conditions”.

After his ******, the US, EU and *** announced new sanctions against Russia. These included freezing the assets of six prison bosses who ran the Arctic Circle penal colony and other sanctions on judges involved in ********* proceedings against Navalny.

Yulia calls the reaction to his ****** by the international community “a joke” and urges them to be “a little less afraid” of ******. She wants to see the president locked up.

“I don’t want him to be in prison, somewhere abroad, in a nice prison with a computer, nice food… I want him to be in a Russian prison. And it’s not just that – I want him to be in the same conditions like Alexei was. But it’s very important for me”.

The Russians claim Navalny ***** of natural causes. Yulia believes President ****** ordered the ********.

“Vladimir ****** is answering for the ****** and for the ******* of my husband”.

She says the Anti-*********** Foundation she now leads in her husband’s place already has “evidence” which she will reveal when they have “the whole picture”.

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In his prison diaries, Navalny accuses President ****** of being “an illegitimate ruler and promoter of ***********”

The book is as much a political work as a memoir, a rallying cry to anyone who believes in a free Russia. It is also being published in Russian, as an ebook and audiobook. But the publishers won’t send hard copies to Russia or Belarus, because they say they can’t guarantee the book would get through customs.

How many Russians will dare to buy it, even in electronic form, is unclear – and how much impact it could have ******** questionable.

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Alexei Navalny at a rally after being prevented from running for president in 2018

The message etched on every page is that Navalny never gave up. His arch wit shines through.

He says, in the punishment cell, he is getting “for free” the experience of staying silent, eating scant food and getting away from the outside world that “rich people suffering from a midlife crisis” pay for.

Only once does he share feeling “crushed”, during the hunger strike he undertook in 2021 in order to demand medical care from civilian doctors. “For the first time, I’m feeling emotionally and morally down,” he writes in one entry.

But Yulia says she never worried that he would actually be broken by the regime.

“I’m absolutely confident that is the point why finally they decided to ***** him. Because they just realised that he will never give up”.

Even the day before he *****, when he appeared in court, Navalny was filmed joking with the judge.

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On 15 February, Navalny appeared in court via video link, where he asked the judge to send him some money

Yulia says laughter was his “superpower”.

“He really, truly laughed at this regime and at Vladimir ******. That’s why Vladimir ****** hated him so much”.

The writing is laced with a great deal of irony.

The book will sell better if he *****, Navalny writes:

Let’s face it, if a murky ************** attempt using a chemical *******, followed by a tragic demise in prison, can’t move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?

In the end, Patriot is also a love story about two people fully committed to a cause they believed in.

A cause for which Yulia has now become the figurehead.

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In his memoir, Alexei describes Yulia as his soulmate, and says she “hates the people who have seized power in our country, probably even more than I do”

After a visit from her, Navalny writes:

I whispered in her ear ‘Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here…. They will poison me’.

‘I know’, she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. ‘I was thinking that myself’…

It was one of those moments when you realise you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.

Patriot is released on Tuesday 22 October

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