Alexei Navalny’s widow shares first photo with ‘brave and stoic’ daughter since dad’s sudden death in Russian prison
Alexei Navalny’s widow on Thursday shared a moving photo with her “stoic” daughter Dasha, thanking her for her strength and support after Navalny’s unexplained and sudden death in a hellhole Siberian jail.
The selfie posted on Yulia Navalanya’s recently launched X account, which already boasts more than 320,000 followers, shows the grieving mom and daughter dressed in black and huddled together.
Yulia, 47, is seen in the somber photo looking into the camera with her hand over her mouth while Dasha, 23, is bundled into a black North Face jacket, staring just off camera.
“My darling girl. I flew here to hug you and support you, and you are sitting and supporting me. So strong, brave and stoic,” she wrote. “We will definitely cope with everything, my dear one. It’s so good that you’re at my side. I love you.”
The touching post came just before President Biden met in San Francisco. Dasha is a student at nearby Stanford University.
The meeting represented the first confirmation of Yulia’s whereabouts since her husband’s death.
Daria is Yulia and Alexei’s eldest child. They also have a son, 15-year-old Zakhar.
Yulia also hit out at former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on X Thursday, after he outrageously claimed that she seemed pleased with his death — arguing it offered her the opportunity to launch her own political career.
“Look at the smiling, happy face of Navalny’s widow,” the staunch Putin ally told local reporters during an interview. “I have a feeling that she had been waiting for this event all these years so she could to roll out her political life, and she has already said as much. All this is sad.”
Yulia dismissed Medvedev as a “nonentity” and “worthless” — but discouraged her supporters from lashing out at him in her defense.
“They are deliberately palming off this worthless man to you, so you could unload on him,” she said in a post. “You must write instead about how Putin killed Alexei. Write it every day.”
The brave mom has vowed to continue her husband’s struggle against Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom she has repeatedly accused of killing Navalny — a claim the Kremlin had angrily denied.
Nearly a week after Putin’s fiercest domestic opponent was said to have collapsed on a walk and died, there was still no official word on his cause of death, with Russian officials denying the Navalny family’s demands to release his body, claiming that it was needed for a 14-day “chemical analysis.”
Navalny’s mother Lyudmila, who has traveled to the remote Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism and other charges, issued a video appeal to Putin to hand over her son immediately.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, has also filed a lawsuit seeking the release of the body, but Russian state media have reported her complaint will not be heard by a court until March 4.
