{"id":15916,"date":"2024-02-23T06:55:10","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T06:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/23\/mother-of-kremlin-critic-alexey-navalny-says-she-has-seen-his-body-is-being-pressured-to-hold-secret-funeral\/"},"modified":"2024-02-23T06:55:10","modified_gmt":"2024-02-23T06:55:10","slug":"mother-of-kremlin-critic-alexey-navalny-says-she-has-seen-his-body-is-being-pressured-to-hold-secret-funeral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/23\/mother-of-kremlin-critic-alexey-navalny-says-she-has-seen-his-body-is-being-pressured-to-hold-secret-funeral\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny says she has seen his body, is being pressured to hold secret funeral"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The mother of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony last week, said Thursday she had seen her son\u2019s body and was being pressured to hold a secret funeral. <\/p>\n

Lyudmila Navalnaya said she had seen her son\u2019s body on Wednesday in a morgue in Salekhard, the Siberian town near the prison where Navalny had been held since December, after being denied access to it for days after his death. <\/p>\n

She also saw a medical report stating his cause of death as being natural, Navalny\u2019s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on X. The late Kremlin critic\u2019s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, reiterated on Thursday that she believes Russian President Vladimir Putin killed her husband and urged the media not to be diverted by Russian government narratives. <\/p>\n

In a video posted on her son\u2019s YouTube channel, Navalny\u2019s mother said: \u201cAccording to the law, they should have given me Alexey\u2019s body right away, but they haven\u2019t done it yet. Instead, they blackmail me and set conditions for where, when and how Alexey should be buried.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m recording this video because they started threatening me. Looking into my eyes they say that if I don\u2019t agree to a secret funeral they will do something with my son\u2019s body,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

Navalnaya claimed that an investigator named Voropayev told her: \u201cTime is working against you. The corpse is decomposing.\u201d She did not give the full name of the official. <\/p>\n

She also claimed the Russian Investigative Committee looking into the circumstances of her son\u2019s death would like to bury his body \u201csecretly without saying goodbye.\u201d She said the investigators \u201cclaim that they know the cause of death and that they have all the medical legal documents,\u201d and that she had signed his medical death certificate. <\/p>\n

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of\u00a0Navalny\u2019s Anti-Corruption Foundation,\u00a0told Russian\u00a0journalist Alexander Plyushchev the committee had set numerous\u00a0conditions for Navalny\u2019s mother to follow before they would release the body. <\/p>\n

Among those conditions, he claimed, were that that any funeral should be kept \u201camong the family\u201d and not announced, to prevent crowds from gathering, and that the body should be transported to Moscow on a special plane. The family would also have to be accompanied by an employee of the\u00a0committee\u00a0at all times before the funeral, he said, and Navalny\u2019s\u00a0body\u00a0would have to be kept in either the Moscow or Vladimir region prior to burial because the committee\u00a0was \u201cafraid that the morgue will be stormed.\u201d <\/p>\n

Only when those conditions were met would the family receive Navalny\u2019s death certificate, Zhdanov said. <\/p>\n

Navalny\u2019s\u00a0mother\u00a0was first denied the cemetery of her choice, and then both parties agreed\u00a0to\u00a0hold the funeral at Khovanskoye cemetery in Moscow, Zhdanov said, adding that the parties hadn\u2019t agreed on the farewell hall.\u00a0Navalny\u2019s\u00a0mother\u00a0was pressured into\u00a0agreeing\u00a0to\u00a0these\u00a0conditions, Zhdanov added. <\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, I have not seen her words so I cannot comment on that,\u201d Peskov said. He added that the Kremlin was \u201cdealing with different issues which are of great importance for our country.\u201d <\/p>\n

Navalny\u2019s wife, Navalnaya, had earlier accused Russian authorities of \u201chiding\u201d his body in an attempt to disguise the cause of his death. She said they were \u201clying pathetically\u201d and waiting for \u201ctraces of another of Putin\u2019s Novichoks to disappear.\u201d The Kremlin has said an investigation into the circumstances around Navalny\u2019s death is \u201cunderway\u201d and the results are currently \u201cunknown.\u201d <\/p>\n

Navalny\u2019s mother\u2019s claims to have seen his body come almost a week after his death was announced on February 16. The news drew barbed reaction from Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden, who pinned the blame on his Russian counterpart, saying that \u201cwhat has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin\u2019s brutality.\u201d <\/p>\n

Russia meanwhile has accused the US of \u201chysteria,\u201d regarding his death. \u201cThe US acts as the prosecutors, as the judge, and as the punisher all in one, and this hysteria regarding the death of Navalny is a prime example of that,\u201d Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday at a G20 press conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. \u201cThese people have no right to interfere in our home affairs, especially given their own problems,\u201d Lavrov said. <\/p>\n

US President Joe Biden met with Navalny\u2019s wife and daughter in California on Thursday, where he expressed his condolences and his \u201cadmiration\u201d for Navalny\u2019s \u201cextraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption.\u201d <\/p>\n

Navalny was Russia\u2019s highest-profile opposition leader and spent years criticizing Putin, who has been in power for nearly a quarter of a century, at great personal risk. His death came weeks before the country\u2019s presidential elections scheduled for March 17, which is widely seen by the international community as little more than a formality that will secure Putin a fifth term in power. <\/p>\n

He returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated after being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. On arrival Navalny was swiftly arrested \u2013 on charges he dismissed as politically motivated \u2013 and spent the rest of his life in prison. <\/p>\n

The Russian prison service said Navalny \u201cfelt unwell after a walk\u201d in his Siberian penal colony and \u201calmost immediately\u201d lost consciousness. <\/p>\n

Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August after being found guilty of creating an extremist community, financing extremist activists and various other crimes. He was already serving sentences of 11-and-a-half years in a maximum security facility on fraud and other changes he denies. <\/p>\n

He was initially imprisoned in a penal colony about 150 miles east of Moscow, but his lawyers in December said they had lost contact with him for nearly three weeks. After filing 680 requests to locate him, his team announced on December 25 that they had \u201cfound\u201d Navalny more than 1,000 miles away at the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, known as \u201cPolar Wolf.\u201d <\/p>\n

Navalny spent his final weeks in the IK-3 colony, where he described the \u201cfreezing\u201d conditions to a Moscow court, telling them he slept under a newspaper for warmth. <\/p>\n

This is a developing story and will be updated<\/em> <\/p>\n\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The mother of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony last week, said Thursday she had seen her son\u2019s body and was being pressured to hold a secret funeral. Lyudmila Navalnaya said she had seen her son\u2019s body on Wednesday in a morgue in Salekhard, the Siberian town near the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":15917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}