Relatives and supporters of Alexei Navalny are bidding farewell to the opposition leader at a funeral Friday in southeastern Moscow, following a battle with authorities over the release of his body after his still-unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony. His supporters say several churches in Moscow refused to hold the service before Navalny\u2019s team got permission from one in the capital\u2019s Maryino district, where he once lived before his 2020 poisoning, treatment in Germany and subsequent arrest on his return to Russia.<\/p>\n
The Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, which agreed to hold the service, did not mention it on its social media page. Authorities lined the road from a nearby subway station to the church with crowd-control barriers, and riot police deployed in big numbers early Friday. Burial was to follow in the nearby Borisovskoye Cemetery, where police also showed up in force.<\/p>\n
Navalny\u2019s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, spent eight days trying to get authorities to release the body following his Feb. 16 death at Penal Colony No. 3 in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region about 1,900 kilometres (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. Authorities originally said they couldn\u2019t turn over the body because they needed to conduct post-mortem tests. Navalnaya, 69, made a video appeal to President Vladimir Putin to release the body so she could bury her son with dignity.<\/p>\n
Once it was released, at least one funeral director said he had been \u201cforbidden\u201d to work with Navalny\u2019s supporters, the spokeswoman for Navalny\u2019s team, Kira Yarmysh, said on social media. They also were unable to find a hearse for the funeral. \u201cUnknown people are calling up people and threatening them not to take Alexei\u2019s body anywhere,\u201d Yarmysh said Thursday.<\/p>\n
Russian authorities still haven\u2019t announced the cause of death for Navalny, 47, who crusaded against official corruption and organized big protests as Putin\u2019s fiercest political foe. Many Western leaders blamed the death on the Russian leader, which the Kremlin angrily rejected.<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear who among Navalny\u2019s family or allies would attend the funeral, with many of his associates in exile abroad due to fear of prosecution in Russia. Navalny\u2019s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his regional offices were designated as \u201cextremist organizations\u201d by the Russian government in 2021. The politician\u2019s team said the funeral would be streamed live on Navalny\u2019s YouTube channel.<\/p>\n
His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, accused Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of trying to block a public funeral. \u201cWe don\u2019t want any special treatment \u2013 just to give people the opportunity to say farewell to Alexei in a normal way,\u201d Yulia Navalnaya wrote on X. In a speech to European lawmakers Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, she also expressed fears that police might interfere with the gathering or would \u201carrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moscow authorities refused permission for a separate memorial event for Navalny and slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Friday, citing COVID-19 restrictions, politician Yekaterina Duntsova said Thursday. Nemtsov, a 55-year-old former deputy prime minister, was shot to death as he walked on a bridge adjacent to the Kremlin on the night of Feb. 27, 2015. Yarmysh also urged Navalny\u2019s supporters around the world to lay flowers in his honor Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone who knew Alexei says what a cheerful, courageous and honest person he was,\u201d Yarmysh said Thursday. \u201cBut the greater truth is that even if you never met Alexei, you knew what he was like, too. You shared his investigations, you went to rallies with him, you read his posts from prison. His example showed many people what to do when even when things were scary and difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny\u2019s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said that his funeral had initially been planned for Thursday \u2013 the day of Putin\u2019s annual state-of-the-nation address \u2013 but no venue agreed to hold it then. In an interview with the independent Russian news site Meduza, Zhdanov said authorities had pressured Navalny\u2019s relatives to \u201chave a quiet family funeral.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Relatives and supporters of Alexei Navalny are bidding farewell to the opposition leader at a funeral Friday in southeastern Moscow,\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":32952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[4720,4656,2108,2930,7094,499],"class_list":["post-32951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-alexei-navalny","tag-corruption","tag-death","tag-funeral","tag-opposition-leader","tag-vladimir-putin"],"reading_time":"4 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}