The team of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who was President Vladimir Putin's fiercest domestic opponent, said it plans to organize a public memorial service in Moscow by Friday.
"We are looking for a hall for Alexei's public farewell," Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Monday on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. The planned date is the end of the current working week, she added.
Navalny died suddenly on February 16 in the prison camp with the unofficial name "Polar Wolf" in the Siberian Arctic region of Yamal, Russian authorities said. The circumstances of his death remain unclear, but Western governments said they hold Putin responsible.
Navalny, who was weakened by a poison attack in 2020 and repeated solitary confinement in the camp, is said to have collapsed while exercising in the icy prison yard and died despite attempts to resuscitate him.
According to Navalny's team, the death certificate mentions "natural" causes.
It is unclear whether the Kremlin will allow a public memorial service to go forward, especially after hundreds of people mourning Navalny in public have been arrested in recent days.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Navalny's mother, has accused Russian authorities of having tried to pressure her to bury her son in secret, which she refused to do. She has called instead for a public ceremony to allow his supporters to pay their respects.
The Kremlin on Monday rejected her allegations, labelling them as "absurd."
"Of course the Kremlin cannot exert any pressure. These are further absurd statements by (Navalny's) supporters," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Interfax news agency.
Navalny's body was only handed over to his mother on Saturday, more than a week after his death and after days pleading with the authorities, including a direct appeal to Putin to release the body.
In a new twist on Monday, Navalny's team said that his death had come just days before he could have been exchanged for a Russian convicted of murder in Germany.
"Navalny should have been released in the next few days because we had reached a decision on his exchange," said the political director of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, in a seven-minute video published on YouTube on Monday.
"Alexei Navalny could have been sitting in my place right now, today," she added.
She said Vadim K., who is serving a life sentence in the August 2019 killing of a Chechen in a Berlin park, could have been handed over to Russia in exchange for Navalny and two US citizens.
An offer was made to Putin at the beginning of February, in which the Russian man, who was convicted in Germany in December 2021, was to be released, she said.
"I received confirmation that negotiations were at the final stage on the evening of February 15. On February 16, Alexei was killed."
She went on to say that it took two years to prepare the swap, as well as the support of politicians and "the wealthiest people on this planet," including people close to Putin.
In the end, Pevchikh said, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich "delivered the proposal to swap Navalny to Putin."
Pevchikh did not say who else was involved in drawing up these alleged exchange plans nor how specific they were.
A German government spokeswoman, Christiane Hoffmann, said: "At the moment, I cannot comment on this."
German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported, citing Western government circles, that German-Russian negotiations on a prisoner exchange were indeed at an advanced stage.
Pevchikh accused Putin of having personally ordered the killing of Navalny and that he had not wanted to release Navalny at any price.
She suspects that Putin realized that the West was prepared to exchange Vadim K. and then decided to get rid of Navalny as a bargaining chip.
"This is the absolutely illogical, irrational behaviour of a crazy mafiosi," Pevchikh added.
Vadim K. murdered an exiled Chechen in Berlin in 2019 and a German court had found that Russia ordered the murder.
There had been repeated speculation that Putin wanted to free him as part of a prisoner exchange. Most recently, he virtually confirmed this in an interview with right-wing US talk show host Tucker Carlson.
