Alexei Navalny’s widow calls for ‘demonic’ Putin to release body

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, demanded on Saturday that Russian authorities release his body for burial and accused a “demonic” Vladimir Putin of torturing his corpse.

In a six-minute video posted on YouTube, Navalnaya accused the Russian president of holding her husband’s body hostage and questioned Putin’s often-professed Christian faith.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said on Friday that Russian investigators were refusing to release his body from a morgue in the remote Arctic city of Salekhard until she agreed to lay him to rest without a public funeral.

She said an official had told her that she should agree to their demands because Navalny’s body was already decomposing.

Navalny aides said on Saturday that authorities had threatened to bury him in the remote prison colony where he died unless his family agreed to their conditions.

In her video, an emotional Yulia Navalnaya claimed Putin was personally responsible for the whereabouts of her husband’s body and that he was torturing him in death as he had in life.

“We already knew that Putin’s faith was fake, but now we see it more clearly than ever before,” said Navalnaya, dressed in black.

“No true Christian could ever do what Putin is now doing with Alexei’s body.“

Since returning to the Russian presidency in 2012, Putin has positioned himself as a defender of traditional, conservative values against what he portrays as corrosive western liberalism.

He has also trumpeted his closeness to Russia’s Orthodox church, regularly appearing at services during religious festivals and speaking of his faith.

Navalnaya said her husband had been a devout Christian who attended church and had fasted for Lent even while in prison. She said his political activism had been inspired by Christian values.

Concluding her video, she said: “Give us back the body of my husband. We want to hold a funeral service and bury him in a humane way, in the ground, as is customary in Orthodox Christianity.”