Alexei Navalny’s wife has publicly stated that he was killed by poisoning while serving his prison sentence in 2024.
In a video shared on social media, Yulia Navalnaya revealed that an analysis of smuggled biological samples carried out by laboratories in two different countries (unnamed) demonstrated that he had been “murdered” in the Arctic penal colony where he was held.
Navalnaya did not name the poison, but encouraged the laboratories to publish the results, after implying that they refused to do so because “they don’t want an inconvenient truth to surface at the wrong time”.
Navalny died abruptly in jail on 16 February 2024.
In 2020 he was poisoned with Novichok, and was treated in Germany. Upon his return to Russia, he was immediately arrested, and spent three years in jail before his sudden death at 47.
Navalnaya says that her husband’s team was able to “obtain and securely transfer” biological samples abroad.
“I will not be silent. I affirm that Vladimir Putin is guilty of killing my husband”, she says in the video.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was unaware of Navalnaya’s statements.
In the video, Yulia Navalnaya also detailed what she knows to have been his last day, as reported to her by employees of the jail, she says. Reportedly, after returning from a walk, “he lay down on the floor, pulled his knees up, and started moaning in pain… then he started vomiting”.
The guards watched him convulse through the grates.
Prison authorities told his mother, Lyudmila, that her son had “sudden death syndrome”.
“But such is life. There’s nothing to be done about it,” Putin said, after learning of Navalny’s death. He had previously said that he would involve him in a prisoner swap in exchange for life-long exile.
