News | World The widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny branded Vladimir Putin a “murderer and a war criminal” after a court in Russia ordered her to be arrested. Moscow’s Basmanny district court ruled on Wednesday to arrest Yulia Navalnaya, who lives in exile outside Russia, on charges of alleged involvement in an extremist group. She faces immediate arrest if she was to set foot in the country, with a two-month detention order imposed.
Reacting to the court’s decision, part of a sweeping Kremlin crackdown on the opposition, Mrs Navalnaya reiterated claims of Russian President Putin’s involvement in the death of her husband. “His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague, in a cosy cell with a TV, but in Russia — in the same colony and the same two by three metre cell in which he killed Alexey,” she said in a social media post. “Oh, won’t there be the usual procedure? A foreign agent, then the opening of a criminal case, then an arrest?! When you write about this, please do not forget to write the main thing: Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal.
” Mr Navalny died in February in an Arctic prison while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges that he condemned as politically motivated. He was Russia’s highest-profile opposition leader and spent years criticising Putin. Mr Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Moscow in January 2021 from Germany, where he had been recuperating from a nerve agent poisonin.