Yulia Navalnaya Facing Arrest Warrant in Russia

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has been issued an arrest warrant in absentia by a court in Russia. This decision comes five months after her husband’s tragic death in a Russian Arctic penal colony.

The Moscow’s Basmanny District Court ruled to arrest Navalnaya on charges of alleged involvement in an extremist group. Navalnaya has been vocal in holding Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for her husband’s demise, which Russian authorities claim was due to illness after a walk, providing no further details.

Despite Russian officials denying involvement in Navalny’s poisoning and death, Yulia Navalnaya has been living abroad with her two children in an undisclosed location.

Yulia Navalnaya has continued to advocate for justice for her late husband. She recently lit a candle for him at St. Mary’s Church in Berlin.

In response to the court order, Navalanya urged her supporters not to be discouraged but to persevere in their campaign against Putin. She emphasized, “Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal. His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague, in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia — in the same penal colony and the same cell in which he took Alexei’s life.”

Alexei Navalny, a prominent critic of Putin, died while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he had deemed politically motivated. He was imprisoned upon returning to Moscow in January 2021 from Germany, where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in 2020, which he attributed to the Kremlin.