Alexei Navalny’s funeral to be held on Friday in Moscow
Alexei Navalny will be buried in Moscow on Friday, a spokesperson has confirmed.
The service will be held at Borisovskoye Cemetery, after a farewell service at a Moscow church.
In a speech on Wednesday, the opposition leader’s widow, Yulia, said she didn’t know if the funeral would be peaceful or if police would arrest those who came to say goodbye.
Alexei Navalny died suddenly in an Arctic prison earlier this month.
For years, he was the most high-profile critic of Vladimir Putin. His widow has blamed the Russian president for his death, as have many world leaders.
Few details have been released on the cause of his death, and Russian authorities initially refused to hand Navalny’s body over to his mother, Lyudmila. They finally relented eight days after he died.
On Tuesday, Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said his team were struggling to find somewhere to hold the ceremony – some funeral homes had claimed they were fully booked, she said, while others had refused when they found out who the event was for.
“One place told us that funeral agencies were forbidden from working with us,” Ms Yarmysh posted on social media.
Details of the funeral came as Ms Navalnaya addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
In it, she condemned Russia’s “brutal and sneaky” war in Ukraine, and said the West’s strategy for taking on Russia has not worked.
“You can’t hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions that is no different from the previous ones.”
Instead, she urged MEPs to take inspiration from her late husband, calling him “an inventor” who “always had new ideas for everything, but especially for politics”.
—BBC
