Following the death of Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny in a prison camp, his widow Yulia has published a picture of her mourning with their grieving daughter Dasha.
"My sweet little girl. I flew to you to hug and support you, but you are sitting there supporting me," Yulia Navalnaya wrote in a post published on Instagram on Thursday. "You are so strong, so brave and steadfast. We can handle anything, my heart. How good that you are by my side. I love you."
Navalny, who has a 15-year-old son as well as 23-year-old Dasha, died on Friday in a prison camp in the polar region.
Dasha Navalnaya has repeatedly made demands for the release of her imprisoned father and had also given speeches in his honour at award ceremonies. She is studying at Stanford University in the US.
Navalny's widow did not immediately travel to see her children on Friday, but instead visited the Munich Security Conference, where she blamed the Russian President Vladimir Putin for her husband's fate.
On Monday, she was a guest in Brussels at the meeting of EU foreign ministers, and also published a video with a challenge to Putin. She said she wanted to continue her husband's work in challenging corruption within the Russian government system.
Meanwhile, Russia's ex-president Dmitry Medvedev verbally attacked the dead man and his widow in an interview he published on his Telegram channel.
He began by commenting that he could not could not find anything good to say about Navalny, and went on to criticize his widow. "Look at the smiling, happy face of Navalny's widow. It seems as if she has been waiting all these years to start her political career," he claimed, in defiance of the many pictures showing her grief.
Navalnaya retorted on X, formerly Twitter, that the Russian power apparatus only sent Medvedev forward so that people would focus their attention on him - and not on Putin. She added:
"Write about the fact that Putin killed Alexei. Write about it every day. As long as your strength lasts," she wrote.
Navalny's team responded by calling Medvedev a "lousy scumbag".
According to the authorities, Navalny died on February 16 in the prison camp with the unofficial name Polar Wolf, in the Siberian Arctic region of Yamal.
The politician, who was weakened after having been poisoned in 2020 and by repeated stints in solitary confinement in the camp, is said to have collapsed during an exercise period in the prison yard at freezing temperatures and died despite resuscitation attempts. He was 47 years old. The cause of his death is unclear.
