“We demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately,” Yarmysh wrote in a statement on Saturday.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, who had visited her son just on Monday in the harsh prison camp known as “Polar Wolf” in Kharp, a town in the far north region of Yamalo-Nenets, returned there on Saturday morning with Navalny’s lawyer and was given documentation showing his death occurred at 2:17 p.m. local time on Friday.
Navalnaya, 69, faced a grueling and absurd ordeal after she flew into the town of Salekhard early Saturday and drove 33 miles to the Kharp prison, where officials said that her son’s body was taken to the morgue in Salekhard, assuring her it was open and operating, according to Yarmysh.
But when Navalnaya and a lawyer arrived there, the morgue was closed.
They phoned a number on the door, only to be told his body was not there, Yarmysh said.
Yarmysh said a second Navalny lawyer visited the Investigative Committee in Salekhard, where officials said Navalny’s body was undergoing a medical investigation to establish the cause of death. They refused to hand over the body until the official investigation is carried out, stating that the results would be released next week, she said.
“Only an hour ago, the lawyers were informed that the investigation had been concluded and that something criminal had not been established,” Yarmysh posted on Twitter shortly afterward. “They literally lie every time, driving us around in circles and covering their tracks.”
The removal of Navalny’s body from the prison for potential autopsy by Russian authorities indicates that the true cause of his death may never be known.
After Navalny was poisoned with a banned nerve agent in August 2020, he and his supporters fought unsuccessfully for the return of the clothing he had been wearing when he was poisoned, hoping to discover evidence. During an investigation led by the Bellingcat, the investigative journalism group, Navalny later tricked an agent of the Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, into admitting that he had been sent to clean any traces of evidence from Navalny’s underwear, which was in the custody of local authorities.
Lyudmila Navalnaya’s struggle to recover her son’s body on Saturday echoes the stark bureaucratic cruelty when Russian security officials obstructed his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, from evacuating Navalny from the Siberian hospital after his poisoning in 2020.
He was only flown to Germany two days later, after Yulia issued a personal appeal to President Vladimir Putin, who granted the request. Navalny was taken to a hospital in Berlin, where he eventually recovered and returned to Moscow in 2021. He was then immediately arrested, imprisoned, and given several hefty jail terms, totaling 30 years, in cases that he and international rights groups described as trumped up for political retribution.
Yulia Navalnaya and leaders of Navalny’s team initially said that they did not trust statements by Russian authorities on Friday that he had died. But any lingering uncertainty was dispelled Saturday.
Ivan Zhdanov, a leader of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is now based in Vilnius, Lithuania, issued a statement saying: “That’s it. It’s over. Alexei Navalny has been assassinated.”
As recently as Thursday, Navalny was seen on video attending a court hearing, in which he seemed in good health and good spirits, and was even joking with court officials.
Navalny embodied the resistance to Putin’s regime, more than any other Russian opposition figure and in the numbing aftermath of his death, the police arrested dozens of Russians who laid flowers at spontaneous memorials. Late Friday night, security officials with trash bags removed piles of flowers.
In Moscow, at the “Wall of Sorrow,” a memorial to the victims of political repressions, riot police overpowered dozens of people who tried to lay flowers in memory of Navalny and dragged them to a nearby phalanx of security vehicles.
Muscovites left flowers at other highly symbolic locations, including the Solovetsky Stone, a memorial to victims of the Soviet gulag and political repressions in Lubyanka Square, in front of the headquarters of the FSB, previously the KGB.
And they laid flowers at a bridge near the Kremlin where another of Putin’s opposition rivals, Boris Nemstov, was shot to death on Feb. 27, 2015.
With the political opposition crushed inside of Russia and the opposition-in-exile divided, the loss of Navalny’s powerful, charismatic voice raised doubts about its future, just a month before Putin’s certain reelection next month in a presidential contest that excludes any significant opponent.
Navalny’s death was seen as a watershed in Russia signaling that no dissent will be tolerated, as Putin shifts toward a highly centralized, deeply repressive totalitarian regime.
An opposition figure and member of Navalny’s team in exile, Vladimir Milov, said he believed that Navalny’s death was simply murder. “Because they can do anything they want now,” Milov said. “They can withhold the body indefinitely.”
Milov said there could now be no independent investigation to establish the cause of death.
Milov, who tried to convince Navalny not to return to Russia after his poisoning, expressed fury at the members of his team who encouraged him to do so, on the logic that he could not be a relevant opposition figure in exile.
“The idiotic idea that if you go into exile, that’s it, you lose your political capital, you lose your influence and so on — everyone who talks like that and spreads this idea is an accomplice to murder,” he said bitterly. “I want you to stay awake for the rest of your lives.”
OVD-Info, a Russian legal rights group that provides legal assistance to detainees, said that more than 231 people had been arrested in more than 23 cities. The largest number of arrests was in St. Petersburg, where 126 people were detained.
Alexander Polupan, a doctor who treated Navalny after his 2020 poisoning by a nerve agent, said in an interview on Friday that an autopsy would be required to establish how he died.
Asked about the possibility that Navalny may have been poisoned again, he said determining this would require a chemical and toxicological examination.
“Right now we don’t have any medical data to support either version, was it violent death or natural death,” Polupan said.
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