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Russian authorities have returned Alexei Navalny’s body to his mother after what the late opposition leader’s team described as a week of stalemate, obfuscation and threats to leave him to rot.
Authorities in Salechard, the city in northern Russia where the activist’s body was kept in a morgue, released him on Saturday, according to Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman.
The decision ends a week-long standoff between Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and Russian officials in charge of the investigation after his death in a remote Arctic penal colony last week.
Yarmysh said officials had threatened to let his corpse rot or bury him on prison grounds if his family did not agree to a secret funeral.
Navalny’s family and supporters have accused the Kremlin of trying to hush up his death to avoid a show of popular support for him, less than a month before elections in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to extend his 24-year government until at least 2030. .
The Kremlin has already cracked down on attempts to show support for Navalny, arresting nearly 400 people who laid flowers in his memory last weekend. Putin did not comment on Navalny’s death and did not even mention his name in public for more than a decade.
Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, accused Putin of ordering his murder and directing a cover-up, even though the investigation found he died of “natural causes.”
In a video released late Saturday, Navalnaya, who vowed to take on her husband’s role, said Putin personally ordered officials “not to return it, not to put pressure on the mother, to break her and tell her that her son’s corpse It’s rotting.”
Lyudmila Navalnaya is still in Salekhard and has not organized the funeral, Yarmysh said.
“We don’t know if the authorities will stop us from holding [Navalny’s funeral] as the family wants and as Alexey deserves,” Yarmysh wrote on social media.
Navalny, Russia’s strongest voice opposing Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, had been in prison since 2021, when he returned to Russia after recovering from poisoning with the nerve agent novichok.
Around that time, the Kremlin outlawed his foundation, arrested many of his most prominent supporters and effectively banned all dissent, prompting most of his allies and some of his family members to flee the country.
Navalny has been sentenced to decades in increasingly harsh prison conditions and held in a punishment cell 27 times – conditions he says amount to torture.