Putin turns a deaf ear to the campaign to return Navalni's body to his family

Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning a deaf ear to calls to hand over the body of opposition leader Alexei Navalny to his relatives, a week after his death in prison, while his mother denounces plans to carry out his secret burial. Several Nobel Prize winners, intellectuals and Russian artists have addressed the Kremlin by video in a campaign organized by Navalni's co-religionists to allow the deceased politician to be buried and not prolong the family's agony.

According to the opposition, the authorities want to repeat the same scenario as with the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in August in an air disaster after leading a military rebellion against Putin and was buried almost clandestinely amid strict security measures.

In fact, the official medical certificate signed by the opponent's mother attempts to put an end to any speculation about the Kremlin's involvement: Navalny died of “natural causes” after three years behind bars and about 300 days in punishment cells.

Putin's deathly silence

Meanwhile, Putin maintains a stony silence. Engrossed in his re-election campaign, the Russian leader has not made any reference to the death of his number one enemy, but it is not new because it is the same attitude he maintained during his life.. He never mentioned Navalny's name, whom he accused of fueling his popularity with unfounded criticism against the Kremlin, alluding to the videos about the illicit enrichment of Russian officials.

He used all possible euphemisms, from “the condemned man”, “the prisoner” to “the Berlin patient”, as long as he did not say his first or last name, which created the impression that the president was afraid of him. Putin did react when the journalist Anna Politkóvskaya and the opposition Boris Nemtsov were murdered, and even when Prigozhin died, deaths for which he was considered directly responsible. In all cases he threw balls out. He did the same when Navalni was poisoned in 2020 with the chemical agent Novichok.

The corpse of discord

Putin has also ignored for the moment all the demands of the mother, who sent him a letter days ago asking for her son's body to be returned, a call supported by the White House.

The opponent's parent, Liudmila Naválnaya, recorded a video on Thursday in which she accused the Russian Instruction Committee, a body dependent on the Kremlin, of threatening her and wanting to force her to bury him “secretly” in order to avoid public displays of rejection. “I don't agree with this. “I want you, those of you who loved Alexei, for whom his death was a personal tragedy, to have the opportunity to say goodbye to him,” he said.

The president of the United States, Joe Biden, joined the pressure on the Kremlin, as he received in San Francisco the widow, Yulia, who directly accuses the head of the Kremlin of killing her husband, after which Washington announced a new package of sanctions “for Putin's blatant disregard for human life.”

If the funeral is public, “there could be large-scale clashes in Moscow,” according to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a tycoon exiled in Europe. “The authorities do not want people to understand how many there are who oppose Putin (…) If people see that there are actually many (…), the situation can change in a matter of seconds,” he told the portal. Current Time.

Social media campaign

Well-known filmmakers such as Andréi Zviáguintsev; actors like Artur Smolianinov or Tatiana Lázareva; Journalists such as Yevgeni Albats or Dmitri Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2021, have joined the campaign on the Navalny team's Telegram channel. “You still have the opportunity to continue being people. “Do not dehumanize yourselves, nor try to dehumanize all of us,” said Lazareva, who lives in Spain.

Dancers such as Mijaíl Baríshnikov also participate; the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, singers like Andréi Makarévich or activists like Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, leader of Pussy Riot. “My name is Mikhail Barishnikov.. “I strongly ask that the body of the deceased Alexei Navalny be returned to his mother,” he said.

The example of Pontius Pilate

A group of Orthodox religious people has also published an open letter in which they highlight that Navalny, in addition to being an opponent of the Kremlin, was a believer. “Do not be more cruel than (Pontius) Pilate,” they point out in the message that recalls that even the Roman prefect ordered the delivery of Jesus' body to the family for burial. Furthermore, they warn that the refusal “can cause even more tension in society” in a petition already signed by more than a thousand people.