Putin must be held accountable – Yulia Navalnaya
Yulia Navalny, the wife of Alexei Navalny, expressed that if her husband’s reported death is confirmed, Russian President Vladimir Putin must face justice.
She asserted that Putin and his associates should be held personally accountable for the atrocities committed in Russia and called upon the global community to unite against this malevolence.
Navalnaya addressed the Munich Security Conference in Germany unexpectedly, stating her uncertainty about the veracity of the distressing news coming solely from governmental sources.
She emphasized the lack of trustworthiness in the Putin administration, highlighting their consistent deceit.
In a resolute and emotional speech, Navalnaya insisted that if the news proved true, she demanded accountability from Putin, his allies, and the government for the harm inflicted on her family, her husband, and their country.
She pledged that their day of reckoning would arrive soon and received a standing ovation.
Struggling to contain her emotions, she implored the conference attendees to confront the oppressive regime in Russia, asserting that her husband, Alexei Navalny, would have stood alongside them.
The 47-year-old expressed her dilemma between staying in Munich or immediately returning to her children.
Yulia and Alexei Navalny, a budding lawyer, met in Turkey while on holiday in 1998 and married two years later. Their two children, Daria and Zakhar, were born in 2001 and 2008.
Yulia Navalnaya attracted international attention in the summer of 2020, when Navalny was rushed to hospital in the Russian city of Omsk in southwestern Siberia, on suspicion of poisoning. She demanded her husband be sent to Germany for treatment.
She followed him to Berlin where German doctors confirmed he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, and found herself becoming a de-facto spokeswoman for her husband.
Novaya Gazeta, a formerly Russian newspaper that is now published in the Latvian capital, Riga, dubbed Ms. Navalnaya the paper’s 2020 “Hero of the Year”, paying tribute to her resilience in standing by Navalny as he fought to expose Kremlin corruption.
Ms. Navalnaya, an economist by training, was soon thrust into the media’s spotlight as the “first lady of the Russian opposition”.
Coming back from a near-death experience when he was taken out of his coma a few months later, Navalny said of his wife: “Yulia, you saved me.”
She returned to Russia with her husband in January, 2021, and when Navalny was detained, she maintained his arrest was proof the authorities were trying to silence him out of fear.
But the most important thing about her husband, she said, was that he was not afraid, adding, “And I’m not afraid either.” She urged his supporters never to give up, even as Navalny went to prison.
In his final Instagram post on Valentine’s Day, her husband writes: “Baby, everything is like a song with you: between us there are cities, the take-off lights of airfields, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometres.”
Navalny adds that despite the huge distance between them: “I feel that you are near every second and I love you more and more.”
