(HorizonPost.com) – A Russian court last week ordered the arrest of Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as part of the Kremlin’s sweeping crackdown on opposition to the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin.
In a July 9 hearing conducted in absentia, the Basmanny District Court in Moscow ruled that Navalnaya, who lives abroad, would be arrested if she ever returned to Russia for her alleged involvement with an extremist group.
Her husband died in February in a remote penal colony in the Arctic while he was serving a 19-year sentence for extremism. Russian authorities claimed that Navalny died after becoming ill while going for a walk.
Navalny was jailed in January 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany where he had been recovering from being poisoned by a nerve agent in 2020, which he blamed on the Russian government.
After Navalny’s death, his widow accused President Putin of murdering the opposition leader and vowed to continue Navalny’s work.
Moscow vehemently denied any involvement in both Navalny’s poisoning and his death.
Navalnaya dismissed the court’s order for her arrest in a July 9 post on X. She suggested that it should be Vladimir Putin who is put in prison, accusing him of being a war criminal and a murderer.
Navalnaya said Putin should not be given a “cozy cell” in The Hague but instead should be sentenced to the same penal colony and held in the same 2×3 meter cell “in which he killed Alexei.”
Navalnaya’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said the court’s arrest order confirmed her “merits.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz blasted the Russian court, saying in a post on X that the arrest warrant against Navalnaya was “an arrest warrant against the desire for freedom and democracy.”
Scholz also praised Navalnaya for continuing her husband’s legacy.
While the charges against Yulia Navalnaya were not specified in the court’s arrest warrant, they appear to be connected to the extremist organization designation assigned to Navalny’s group Foundation for Fighting Corruption.
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