Alexei Navalny’s body handed over to his mother, Kremlin critic’s spokeswoman says

The body of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been handed to his mother, more than a week after he died in an Arctic prison colony, his spokeswoman said on Saturday.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, died on February 16 in one of Russia’s toughest prisons in northern Siberia, where he was serving a 19-year sentence on charges widely seen as political retribution for his opposition.

“Alexei’s body was handed over to his mother. Many thanks to all those who demanded this with us,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

For the past week, Russian authorities had refused to give Lyudmila Navalnaya custody of her son’s body, after she travelled to the town of Salekhard in the Yamalo-Nenets region, the nearest settlement to the prison colony where Navalny died.