»We know exactly why Putin killed Alexei three days ago. We will let you know soon. We will definitely find out who exactly committed this crime and how exactly it was committed. We will name names and show faces.«
This is what Julija Navalnaya promises in her video message after her husband's death. But can she keep this promise or is this just the combative attitude of the woman who has accompanied her husband's fight for decades? Just an appeal to supporters that the legend must not die in the fight against the Russian ruler?
“Nawalny is said to have discussed everything he did politically with her beforehand,” says Russia expert Ann-Dorit Boy in the podcast. »And she played a large part in his development as a politician and the branding of his brand, so to speak. And a lot of people now have high hopes for them.”
Yulia Navalnaya witnessed her husband being harassed, persecuted, arrested and poisoned. How he returned to Russia after the poisoning, even though he knew he would immediately be imprisoned there again. How Alexei Navalny was subsequently sentenced to 19 years in a prison camp in a series of trials of the type that are being conducted in Putin's Russia. In her video she quotes him as saying “There is no shame in doing little. It's a shame not to do anything." But how much can Yulia Navalnaya do to continue her husband's work? The structure and approach of the video suggest that she continues to work closely with Navalny's team.
"After Navalny was poisoned, Navalny's team and other investigative journalists who joined in did a huge amount of research and actually located the FSB agents - with the name and picture of who they were at the time," says Ann-Dorit Boy. "And to that extent I trust this team to be able to find out a lot about what was going on behind the scenes."
How important was Alexei Navalny for the people of Russia? How dangerous was his political work for Putin's regime? And why is the difficulty of political opposition not just due to systematic repression? Ann-Dorit Boy talks about this in this episode of the SPIEGEL foreign podcast Eight Billion.
Listen to this special episode right here: