Alexei Navalny will be buried at a cemetery in Moscow on Friday, a spokesperson has confirmed.
The service will be held at Borisovskoye Cemetery, after a farewell ceremony in the Maryino district.
Few details have been released on the cause of his death, and Russian authorities initially refused to hand Navalny’s body over to his mother Lyudmila.
They relented eight days after his death.
On Tuesday, Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmish said his team were struggling to find somewhere to hold the ceremony – some funeral homes had claimed they were fully booked, she said, while others refused when they found out who the event was for.
„One place told us that funeral agencies were forbidden from working with us”, Yarmish posted on social media.
Navalny’s team had originally wanted to hold the funeral on 29 February, but „it quickly became clear that there was not a single person around who could dig a grave on that day”, Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, wrote on X.
He implied that the reason for this was because Putin is due to make his yearly address to the Federal Assembly on the same day, says the BBC.
„The Kremlin understands that nobody will care for Putin and his address on the day of Alexei’s farewell”, Zhdanov wrote.
He also encouraged people to arrive early „to have a chance to say goodbye to Alexei”.
A farewell ceremony will take place in the morning, followed by the funeral service at 14:00 (11:00 GMT) and the burial at 16:00 (13:00 GMT).
Since his death at a notorious penal colony in the Arctic Circle on 16 February, some 400 people have been arrested across Russia after laying flowers for him, according to human rights group, OVO-Info.
