Navalny's wife: Putin will pay for what he has done to my husband, my family and the country

Efe Munich

Munich

Updated Friday, February 16, 2024-15:50

The widow of opposition leader

Alexei Navalny

,

Yulia Navalnaya

, has said that President Vladimir Putin and his entourage

"will pay" for her husband's death

.

The prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region confirmed Navalny's death on Friday. An RT source claimed that a blood clot had dislodged. The cause of the Russian opponent's death has not been officially announced.

US Vice President Kamala Harris has stated that Russia is "responsible" for the death of the Russian opposition leader and that, in her opinion, it is another sign of President Putin's "brutality."

"If confirmed, this would be another sign of Putin's brutality. Whatever story they tell, let's make it clear that Russia is responsible," Harris said at the beginning of his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which who, he has recalled, is the wife of the Russian opponent, Yulia Navalnaya.

"This is terrible news that we are working to confirm," added the vice president about the death of the Russian opposition leader, who died suddenly this Friday in the Arctic prison in which he had been since last December, according to the penitentiary services. From Russia.

Navalny, who returned to his native country in 2021 after being poisoned the previous year, according to his allies, by the Federal Security Service, was serving a sentence of almost 30 years in prison for various crimes.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also referred to the issue today from Munich, before meeting with his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

"For more than a decade, the Russian government, Putin, has persecuted, poisoned and imprisoned Aleksey Navalny, and now his death is reported," said the top representative of US diplomacy.

If these reports are accurate, he added, "his death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of a man only underscore the weakness and rot at the heart of the system Putin has built."

"Russia is responsible for this. We will talk to many other countries concerned about Alexei Navalny, and especially if these reports turn out to be true," he noted.

Russia's war against Ukraine was one of the protagonists of Kamala Harris' speech, in which she stated that the world has come together, "with the leadership of the United States," to "defend the basic principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity and to prevent an imperialist authoritarian from subjugating a free and democratic people."

"Make no mistake: Putin's war has already been a complete failure for Russia. Ukraine has regained more than half of the territory that Russia occupied at the beginning of the conflict, thanks in part to a massive supply of American and European weapons," he said. Harris.