Yulia Navalnaya, wife of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, attends the Munich Security Conference (MSC), the day it was announced that Alexei Navalny died from the Yamalo-Nenets region prison service where he was serving time sentence, in Munich, southern Germany, on February 16, 2024.
Kai Pfaffenbach | Afp | Getty Images
Yulia Navalnaya “had no choice.”
That’s what a Ukrainian lawmaker said of the wife of the late Alexei Navalny, who vowed to continue her husband’s political work fighting for democracy in Russia after his death in a Siberian prison last month.
When the first reports of Navalny’s death began to emerge, Navalnaya was in Munich for a security conference. At first she wasn’t sure if she believed what she reported.
Then she took to the main stage: “I thought: should I stand here in front of you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought: what would Alexei have done in my place? And I’m sure he would have done were they here on this stage. “
Yulia Navalnaya (left) is applauded by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola after her speech to the European Parliament on 28 February 2024.
Federico Florin | Afp | Getty Images
From that moment, Yulia Navalnaya transformed her husband’s mission into her own.
“I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny. I will continue to fight for our country. And I invite you to stand by me,” he said in a video message, shared on X, just a few days later.
A sense of injustice
Lisa Yasko, 33 and a member of the Ukrainian parliament, said she can relate. Her partner is in prison in Georgia for opposing the authorities in power.
Ukrainian MP Lisa Yasko gives a speech in April 2022.
Cristina Quicler | Afp | Getty Images
Originally from Kiev, Yasko became a political activist in 2014 after the so-called Maidan uprising, which saw Ukrainians take to the streets to demonstrate for closer ties with the European Union, not Russia.
“I believed I should go into politics to make a change, I felt a sense of injustice,” he told CNBC via Zoom last month.
At the time, Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych had ignored his country’s parliament and refused to sign a cooperation agreement with the European Union.
In 2019, Yasko met current President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and decided to become a deputy for his party.
A view of the barricades in central Kiev after the 2014 demonstrations.
Monique Jaques | Corbis News | Getty Images
Early in her political career, Yasko remembers being seen as “the young one,” but said women in politics began to earn “more respect” after Russia’s invasion.
Yasko was part of the Ukrainian delegation that went to the Munich Security Conference in February to ask for more support from Western allies.
Two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, Yasko said Ukraine now faces “double or triple pressure.”
The “accidental politician”
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is also no stranger to the fight for democratic values. She became Belarusian opposition leader after her husband was arrested for challenging ruling President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Tsikhanouskaya has been in exile since 2020 after opposing Lukashenko in a presidential vote. She represents her country at international meetings and supports tougher sanctions against Lukashenko, who has pushed for the arrest of hundreds of activists who have questioned her nearly three decades in power.
Exiled Belarusian political opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya clutches a folder with the portrait of her husband, jailed opposition figure Sergei Tikhanovsky, in November 2023
Sean Gallup | News Getty Images | Getty Images
“I call myself an accidental politician,” she told CNBC via Zoom.
“It was 2020 when my husband decided to run [the] presidency, but was immediately arrested and barred [running] … For the love of him, first and foremost, I decided to run,” she said.
A statement by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May 2023 said Belarus was “unjustly” detaining over 1,500 political prisoners.
When asked what keeps her going, Tsikhanouskaya said: “It is [a] an immense pain, a pain that transforms into energy.”
“Because when every day you wake up with the thought of your husband… but also with the pain of all the atrocities and torture that a person is experiencing right now, you know, you are so angry with this lawlessness,” she added.