Yulia Navalnaya accuses Russian president of mocking Christianity as officers refuse at hand over stays to household.
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, has demanded that Russian authorities hand over his physique for burial as she accused President Vladimir Putin of mocking Orthodox Christian values and “torturing” his corpse.
“Give us the physique of my husband,” Navalnaya mentioned in a video launched on Saturday, including that she needed to provide him a standard Orthodox funeral.
“You tortured him alive, and now you retain torturing him lifeless. You mock the stays of the lifeless,” she mentioned in a message to Putin.
Navalny, a distinguished opponent of Putin, died last week in a distant maximum-security Arctic penal colony the place he was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism costs.
The authorities declare that he died of pure causes. They’ve refused at hand over his stays to the household even 9 days later.
Navalny’s mom, Lyudmila Navalnaya, has mentioned investigators had been pressuring her to bury her son in “secret” at a non-public ceremony with out mourners.
An official instructed her that she ought to conform to their calls for as a result of Navalny’s physique was already decomposing, she mentioned.
Navalny’s aides mentioned the authorities had threatened to bury him within the jail colony the place he died except his household agreed to their situations.
“They need to take me to the far finish of the cemetery to a recent grave and say: ‘Right here lies your son’,” his mom mentioned in a video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “I’m not agreeing to that.”
‘How low will you sink?’
“No true Christian might ever do what Putin is now doing with the physique of Alexey,” his widow mentioned within the video, as she questioned Putin’s often-professed Christian religion.
“What’s going to you do along with his corpse? How low will you sink to mock the person you murdered?”, she requested and mentioned, “We already knew that Putin’s religion was pretend. However now we see it extra clearly than ever earlier than.”
The Russian chief is ceaselessly pictured in church, dunking himself in ice water to have fun the Epiphany and visiting holy websites in Russia. He has promoted what he has referred to as “conventional values” with out which, he as soon as mentioned, “society degrades”, and has touted his closeness to Russia’s Orthodox Church.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has denounced allegations – even from world leaders – that Putin was concerned in Navalny’s demise, calling them “completely unfounded, insolent accusations in regards to the head of the Russian state”.
Musician Nadya Tolokonnikova, who turned extensively recognized after spending almost two years in jail for collaborating in a 2012 protest along with her band Pussy Riot inside Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, launched a video by which she accused Putin of hypocrisy.
“We had been imprisoned for allegedly trampling on conventional values. However nobody tramples on conventional Russian values greater than you, Putin, your officers and your clergymen who pray for all of the homicide that you simply do, yr after yr, day after day,” mentioned Tolokonnikova, who lives overseas. “Putin, have a conscience, give his mom the physique of her son.”
Tolokonnikova was one in all a number of cultural icons who’ve launched movies calling on Russian authorities to return Navalny’s physique to his household.
Critics say that the authorities worry a funeral might flip right into a large-scale public present of help for the opposition chief.
The funeral preparations for Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Putin ally-turned-rival and founding father of the Wagner mercenary group who died final August, had been surrounded in secrecy and his physique was buried on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg away from the glare of the media.
Whereas Russian media have given little house to the information of Navalny’s demise, individuals flocked to the streets of cities throughout the nation to pay tribute to the opposition chief. Police arrested at least 400 people within the first 24 hours for the reason that information of his demise, in keeping with protest monitoring group OVD-Information.
