Russian regime authorities declared on Friday (16) that several allies and lawyers of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who died in suspicious and controversial circumstances in prison in February, are “extremists and terrorists”.
According to the list by Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial watchdog, the status now applies to the head of the Anti-Corruption Fund, Maria Pevchij; Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmish; and the TV presenter Navalny LIVENina Volkhovskaya; and other collaborators of the late political leader.
Two of Navalny’s lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexandr Fedulov, who live abroad, were also declared “terrorists and extremists”.
Among the people linked to the opposition leader who have been placed on the agency’s monitoring list and are in Russia are journalist Antonina Favorskaya, activist Olga Komleva and computer scientist Alexei Malyarevsky, all accused of “cooperation with the Anti-Corruption Fund”, founded by Navalny.
The news came half a year after Navalny’s death in a prison in the Siberian region.
Relatives and supporters of the opposition leader went to the Borisovo cemetery in Moscow on Friday to pay tribute to the politician, for whose death Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, directly blames Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
According to Yulia, authorities concluded that he died of “arrhythmia.”
“Death occurred as a result of arrhythmia. And tell me, how did they find this arrhythmia during the autopsy? It is impossible to establish a heart rhythm disorder after death, and Alexei did not have any heart disease when he was alive,” Yulia wrote on her late husband’s website.
According to the politician’s widow, the diagnosis offered by the authorities is “a mockery”.
“It’s another pathetic attempt to hide the fact that what happened was murder,” Yulia said.
Navalny, who survived an attempted poisoning with the chemical agent Novichok in 2020, died in February in a maximum security prison in Siberia, where he had been held since late last year and where he was serving a 19-year sentence for his political activism, according to human rights advocates.