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The Russian authorities have transferred the physique of the opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny to his mom, his spokeswoman stated on Saturday, ending a grim battle for custody of his stays, however it’s unclear whether or not he’ll get a funeral that the general public can attend.
“Aleksei’s physique has been handed over to his mom,” Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, stated in a press release posted on social media. “The funeral is but to return. We don’t know whether or not the authorities will intervene with carrying it out in the best way the household needs and as Aleksei deserves.”
Mr. Navalny’s mom, Lyudmila Navalnaya, on Saturday was nonetheless within the northern metropolis of Salekhard, close to the Arctic jail the place Mr. Navalny was reported to have died on Feb. 16, Ms. Yarmysh stated. She added that the opposition chief’s staff would launch details about the funeral “because it turns into obtainable.”
Mr. Navalny’s household and aides have accused the Russian authorities of protecting his physique hostage and “blackmailing” his mom into agreeing to bury him in secret. On Friday, Ms. Yarmysh stated that officers in Salekhard had given Ms. Navalnaya an ultimatum demanding that she assent to such a secret funeral inside three hours, or else that he could be buried on jail grounds.
That deadline handed on Friday night with none new info from Mr. Navalny’s aides. The Russian authorities haven’t commented on the Navalny staff’s model of occasions.
The circumstances of Mr. Navalny’s dying stay unclear, and it was not instantly evident whether or not his household would search to conduct an impartial post-mortem earlier than his burial. In line with Ms. Yarmysh, Ms. Navalnaya acquired a medical report earlier this week that stated he had died of pure causes.
The information that Ms. Navalnaya, 69, acquired custody of the physique advised that the Russian authorities had relented after a dayslong social media marketing campaign by Mr. Navalny’s staff. On Saturday, Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, 47, launched a six-minute YouTube video denouncing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for maligning the Christian values he professes as he “mocks Aleksei’s mom and forces her to conform to a secret funeral.”
“That is some type of Satanism, paganism,” she stated. “What are you planning on doing together with his physique?”
The Navalny staff’s social media accounts additionally shared videos of Russian celebrities just like the ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov calling on the Kremlin to launch Mr. Navalny’s stays.
“Because of all who posted and recorded video messages,” a prime Navalny aide, Ivan Zhdanov, stated on the Telegram social messaging app. “You all did what you need to have finished.”
The query now’s how Mr. Navalny’s funeral will take form. The dispute over custody of his physique seems to mirror the Kremlin’s fears a few public funeral in Moscow turning into a focus for protest.
Final August, the authorities in St. Petersburg orchestrated a secret burial of the mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who died in a airplane crash after main a 24-hour revolt and marching on Moscow. However Mr. Navalny’s household and aides have declared that they won’t settle for a quiet burial, signaling they may attempt to flip the opposition chief’s funeral right into a uncommon present of dissent inside Russia.
Mr. Putin “shouldn’t be permitting folks to say farewell to Aleksei,” Mr. Navalny’s longtime chief of workers, Leonid Volkov, stated in a video posted on-line Friday.
“I’m shocked that he’s not excited about how he himself might be buried,” Mr. Volkov added, referring to the Russian president. “In his place, I might give it some thought.”
In making an attempt to construct momentum for a public funeral, the Navalny staff seems to be following the course of their lifeless chief, who had urged his supporters to maintain combating if he have been ever killed. In a extensively circulated clip from an interview for the 2022 “Navalny” documentary, Mr. Navalny says that if he’s killed, “you aren’t allowed to surrender.”
“In the event that they resolve to kill me, it signifies that we’re extremely robust,” he says. “We have to make the most of this energy to not quit.”
The Navalny staff’s Saturday announcement concerning the switch of his physique got here on the second anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many Ukrainians have lengthy criticized Mr. Navalny — and his widow, Ms. Navalnaya — for not being sufficiently vocal in endorsing Ukraine’s sovereignty.
However Ms. Navalnaya did confer with the conflict in her video on Saturday, declaring that Mr. Putin and his officers would sometime reply “for the conflict you began two years in the past.”
Mr. Putin and his allies say “that you simply’re combating some Western evil that interferes with our conventional values,” she stated. “However you simply kill. You simply bomb sleeping civilians at night time.”
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