Yulia Navalnaya, now the widow of Vladimir Putin critic Alexei Navalny, demanded after her husband’s death on Friday that the Russian autocrat and his government “be personally held responsible for all of the atrocities they have committed.”
Russian correctional authorities announced earlier on Friday that Alexei Navalny, who was serving a 19-year prison sentence in an Arctic penal colony, died after experiencing a sudden collapse. Given the cloud of suspicious deaths surrounding vocal Putin critics — and the fact that Navalny had survived two previous assassination attempts — Russia‘s description of his death has been met with immediate suspicion.
Yulia Navalnaya, who was in attendance at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, took the stage in a surprise appearance shortly after the news of her husband’s death became public.
“I thought, ‘Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children?’ Then I thought, ‘What would would have Alexei done in my place?’” she told the conference.
Navalnaya added she could not trust the claims made by the Russian authorities because “they are lying constantly.”
“I want Putin and his entire circle know that they’ll bear responsibility for what they did with our country and my family and my husband,” she said. “And this day will come very soon.”
Navalnaya called upon “all the international community, all the people in the world, we should come together and we should fight against this evil.”
“We should fight this horrific regime in Russia today,” she said. “This regime and Vladimir Putin should be personally held responsible for all the atrocities they have committed in our country the last years.”
The crowd in Munich gave her a standing ovation.
Alexei Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, wrote on Facebook that she doesn’t “want to hear any condolences,” adding that she saw her son “in prison on the (Feb) 12, in a meeting. He was alive, healthy and happy.”