Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia says she’ll stand as Russian President

Yulia Navalnaya intends to be president of Russia, she tells me. She seems me straight within the eye. No hesitation or wavering.

This, like so lots of the choices she made together with her husband, the opposition chief Alexei Navalny, is unambiguous.

Navalnaya is aware of she faces arrest if she returns dwelling whereas President Putin remains to be in energy. His administration has accused her of taking part in extremism.

This is not any empty risk. In Russia, it might result in demise.

Her husband, President Putin’s most vocal critic, was sentenced to 19 years for extremism, prices that have been seen as politically motivated. He died in February in a brutal penal colony within the Arctic Circle. US President Joe Biden stated there was “no doubt” Putin was guilty. Russia denies killing Navalny.

Yulia Navalnaya, sitting down for our interview in a London authorized library, seems and sounds each inch the successor to Navalny, the lawyer turned politician who dreamt of a unique Russia.

As she launches Patriot, the memoir her husband was writing earlier than his demise, Yulia Navalnaya restated her plans to proceed his battle for democracy.

When the time is true, “I will participate in the elections… as a candidate,” she advised the BBC.

“My political opponent is Vladimir Putin. And I will do everything to make his regime fall as soon as possible”.

For now, that must be from exterior Russia.

She tells me that whereas Putin is in cost she can not return. But Yulia seems ahead to the day she believes will inevitably come, when the Putin period ends and Russia as soon as once more opens up.

Just like her husband, she believes there would be the likelihood to carry free and truthful elections. When that occurs, she says she can be there.

Her household has already suffered terribly within the wrestle towards the Russian regime, however she stays composed all through our interview, steely every time Putin’s title comes up.

Her private grief is channelled into political messaging, in public anyway. But she tells me, since Alexei’s demise, she has been pondering much more concerning the influence the couple’s shared political views and choices have had on their youngsters, Dasha, 23, and Zakhar, 16.

“I understand that they didn’t choose it”.

But she says she by no means requested Navalny to vary course.

He was barred from standing for president by Russia’s Central Election Commission.

His investigations via his Anti-Corruption Foundation have been considered by hundreds of thousands on-line, together with a video posted after his final arrest, claiming that Putin had constructed a one-billion greenback palace on the Black Sea.

The president denied it.

Yulia says: “When you live inside this life, you understand that he will never give up and that is for what you love him”.

Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020.

He was flown to Germany for remedy and the German chancellor demanded solutions from Putin’s regime.

Navalny labored with open-source investigators Bellingcat and traced the poisoning to Russia’s safety service, the FSB.

He started writing his memoir as he recovered.

He and Yulia returned to Russia in January 2021 the place he was arrested after touchdown.

Many ask why they returned.

“There couldn’t be any discussion. You just need to support him. I knew that he wants to come back to Russia. I knew that he wants to be with his supporters, he wanted to be an example to all these people with his courage and his bravery to show people that there is no need to be afraid of this dictator.

“I never let my brain think that he might be killed… we lived this life for decades and it’s about you share these difficulties, you share these views. You support him”.

After his jailing, Navalny continued his guide in pocket book entries, posts on social media and jail diaries, revealed for the primary time. Some of his writing was confiscated by the jail authorities, he stated.

Patriot is revealing – and devastating. We all know Navalny’s last chapter, which makes the descriptions of his remedy – and his braveness within the face of it – much more poignant.

Navalny spent 295 days in solitary confinement, punished, in line with the guide, for violations together with the highest button of his fatigues being unbuttoned. He was disadvantaged of telephone calls and visits.

Yulia Navalnaya advised me: “Usually, the normal practice is banishment just for two weeks and it’s the most severe punishment. My husband spent there almost one year.”

In a prison diary from August 2022, Navalny writes from solitary confinement:

It is so hot in my cell you can hardly breathe. You feel like a fish tossed onto the shore, yearning for fresh air. Most often, though, it is like a cold, dank cellar….. It is invariably isolated, with loud music constantly playing. In theory, this is to prevent prisoners in different cells from being able to shout to each other; in practice, it is to drown out the screams of those being tortured.

Navalnaya says she was prevented from visiting or speaking to her husband for two years before he died. She says Alexei was tortured, starved and kept in “awful conditions”.

After his death, the US, EU and UK announced new sanctions against Russia. These included freezing the assets of six prison bosses who ran the Arctic Circle penal colony and other sanctions on judges involved in criminal proceedings against Navalny.

Yulia calls the reaction to his death by the international community “a joke” and urges them to be “a little less afraid” of Putin. She desires to see the president locked up.

“I don’t want him to be in prison, somewhere abroad, in a nice prison with a computer, nice food… I want him to be in a Russian prison. And it’s not just that – I want him to be in the same conditions like Alexei was. But it’s very important for me”.

The Russians claim Navalny died of natural causes. Yulia believes President Putin ordered the killing.

“Vladimir Putin is answering for the death and for the murder of my husband”.

She says the Anti-Corruption Foundation she now leads in her husband’s place already has “evidence” which she will reveal when they have “the whole picture”.

The book is as much a political work as a memoir, a rallying cry to anyone who believes in a free Russia. It is also being published in Russian, as an ebook and audiobook. But the publishers won’t send hard copies to Russia or Belarus, because they say they can’t guarantee the book would get through customs.

How many Russians will dare to buy it, even in electronic form, is unclear – and how much impact it could have remains questionable.

The message etched on every page is that Navalny never gave up. His arch wit shines through.

He says, in the punishment cell, he is getting “for free” the experience of staying silent, eating scant food and getting away from the outside world that “rich people suffering from a midlife crisis” pay for.

Only once does he share feeling “crushed”, during the hunger strike he undertook in 2021 in order to demand medical care from civilian doctors. “For the first time, I’m feeling emotionally and morally down,” he writes in one entry.

But Yulia says she never worried that he would actually be broken by the regime.

“I’m absolutely confident that is the point why finally they decided to kill him. Because they just realised that he will never give up”.

Even the day before he died, when he appeared in court, Navalny was filmed joking with the judge.

Yulia says laughter was his “superpower”.

“He really, truly laughed at this regime and at Vladimir Putin. That’s why Vladimir Putin hated him so much”.

The writing is laced with a great deal of irony.

The book will sell better if he dies, Navalny writes:

Let’s face it, if a murky assassination attempt using a chemical weapon, followed by a tragic demise in prison, can’t move a book, it is hard to imagine what would. The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?

In the end, Patriot is also a love story about two people fully committed to a cause they believed in.

A cause for which Yulia has now become the figurehead.

After a visit from her, Navalny writes:

I whispered in her ear ‘Listen, I don’t wish to sound dramatic, however I believe there’s a excessive likelihood I’ll by no means get out of right here…. They will poison me’.

‘I know’, she stated with a nod, in a voice that was calm and agency. ‘I was thinking that myself’…

It was one of those moments when you realise you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.

Patriot is launched on Tuesday 22 October