Alexei Navalny death latest: X restores wife Yulia’s account as Putin brings

Before the sudden death of her husband Alexei Navalny in a grim Arctic prison last week, Yulia Navalnaya had always played down the suggestion that she would one day take over as leader of Russia’s opposition.

But on Monday, as the 47-year-old widow alternated between rage and grief, she gave a powerful speech signalling that she would be there to help lead a shell-shocked opposition – a job fraught with danger.

“I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia,” said the mother-of-two in a video message. Stepping out of the shadow of her dead husband, she called on his supporters to “share the rage” and “stand” with her.

Filmed from a dimly lit room in an undisclosed location outside of Russia, the message in the video was both emotional and political.

My colleague Namita Singh reports:

The mother of dead Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has issued a direct plea to Vladimir Putin for the release of her son’s body so she can “bury him with dignity”.

In a video filmed outside the Arctic penal colony where he died on Friday, Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, said she had been trying to see him for five days but didn’t even know where he was being kept.

“Let me finally see my son. I demand that Alexei’s body be released immediately so that I can bury him in a humane way,” she said from the village of Kharp, some 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, where it is minus 10C.

You can more in this full report of today’s developments:

Alexei Navalny issued a chilling warning about what a second presidential term for Donald Trump could mean in one of his final letters before he died in an Arctic prison last week.

In one 3 December letter to Evgeny Feldman, a photographer who covered his attempted run for president in 2018 and now lives in exile in Latvia, Navalny wrote that he feared that if anything should happen to President Joe Biden – a distinct possibility, he felt, given the American’s advanced age – “Trump will become president”.

To Navalny, a second Mr Trump term was a “really scary” prospect for the wider world. “Doesn’t this obvious thing concern the Democrats?” he asked Mr Feldman, apparently incredulous that 81-year-old Mr Biden is pursuing a second term rather than yielding to a younger successor to take on Mr Trump.

My colleague Joe Sommerlad has more in this report:

The European Union has summoned Russia’s representative to the bloc and called for an independent international investigation into the death Alexei Navalny.

The EU’s diplomatic service said a senior Brussels figure had also urged Russia to release Navalny’s body to his family without further delay at the meeting with Kirill Loginov, Russia’s acting permanent representative to the EU.

“The EU side conveyed…