NY POST
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s widow accused President Vladimir Putin’s regime of poisoning her husband with the nerve agent Novichok — and then barring the family from seeing his body to allow traces of the deadly chemical to disappear from his system.
In a powerful, nine-minute address posted on Navalny’s official YouTube channel Monday, Yulia Navalnaya directly blamed Putin for the death of her “children’s father” — and said she knew why he was killed on Friday while serving time at a notoriously brutal Arctic penal colony.
“We know exactly why Putin killed Alexei three days ago,” Navalnaya said. “We will tell you about it soon. We will definitely find out who exactly carried out this crime and how exactly. We will name the names and show the faces.”
The courageous mother of two, who had stood by her husband’s side through years of government persecution, also vowed to continue Alexei’s work — and called on supporters to resist Putin more fiercely than ever before.
“Vladimir Putin killed my husband,” Navalnaya said.
By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me — half of my heart and half of my soul. But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up.
“I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work. I will continue to fight for our country. And I encourage you to stand by my side,” she added.
“Do not just share the endless grief and pain that has enveloped us and will not let us go. I ask you to share this anger with me. Anger, rage, hatred for those who have dared to destroy our future.”
It is unclear where Navalnaya is staying.
Navalny, 47, who had survived being poisoned with Novichok in 2020, died on Friday after Russian prison officials claimed that he collapsed and lost consciousness while on a walk at the “Polar Wolf” prison…
Navalny’s mother and family lawyers have spent the past days trying to recover his body from the Salekhard District Clinical Hospital and learn his cause of death, only to be told that the postmortem investigation had been extended indefinitely.
“They are lying, buying time for themselves, and not even hiding it,” Kira Yarmysh, a Navalny spokesperson, wrote on social media.
Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, accused the Kremlin of a cover-up similar to what happened after the opposition leader’s poisoning in 2020, in which the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok was applied to his underwear while he was traveling from the city of Omsk to Moscow.
Novichok is a highly toxic nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. It is believed to be five to 10 times more lethal than better-known poison gases VX and sarin.
When exposed to the poison, it causes a “slowing of the heart and restriction of the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation,” Professor Gary Stephens, a pharmacology expert at the University of Reading, told Reuters.
“We have seen it all before in Omsk,” Zhdanov said. “They’re lying to us. It’s clear what they’re doing right now: They’re mopping up the traces of their crime.”
The Kremlin has denied involvement in Navalny’s death — and warned that Western claims that Putin had his most formidable political foe killed were unacceptable…
