After days of requests, Alexei Navalny’s mother was shown her son’s body today. But the authorities still refuse to hand him over to his family. The spokeswoman for the Navalny team, Kira Yarmysh, writes on This is because, says Yarmysh, “they want to do it in secret, without giving him a chance to say goodbye.” In the documents, she adds, natural causes are cited for the death. Meanwhile, the dissident’s death continues to arouse diplomatic controversy. According to Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, the Kremlin has an “enormous responsibility”: “You can die at the hands of a killer or through an inflicted death: whether directly caused or not, it is always a homicide”. The issue was also “put on the table” at the meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Rio De Janeiro, where the head of UK diplomacy David Cameron stated – addressing his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov – that Russia killed the opponent that for this reason he “will have to pay for it”, without receiving an answer. However, Lavrov spoke on the sidelines of the G20: “No one has the right to interfere in our internal affairs regarding Navalny, given what they did with Julian Assange”. And he added: “We reject an international investigation into his death. We will take care of it ourselves. This is arrogance. These are forms of neocolonialism.”
Farnesina urges the Russian ambassador: “Clarify”
Yesterday the Russian ambassador to Italy, Alexey Paramonov, was summoned by the Farnesina and was received in the afternoon by the director of Political Affairs Pasquale Ferrara, on Tajani’s recommendation. The Russian diplomat was told “Italy’s expectation that full clarity be made on the circumstances of Navalny’s disappearance”, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. And in the meantime not even an all-Italian controversy has subsided. “It is enough for Matteo Salvini to say something reasonable – that is, to wait for the investigations to understand whether Navalny died of a heart attack, of frostbite, or of torture – and he is immediately crucified”, he says in an interview with The print, Gianluca Savoini, former spokesperson of the Northern League secretary. “Why this exploitation? – He adds – Because it is enough for Mr Biden, the leader of the world, to decide that it was Putin who had him killed, and everyone must conform. But he then wants to do the same thing with Julian Assange”.
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Navalny, according to the Times the cause of death was a punch to the heart
London’s reaction
Meanwhile, other countries are also moving: the British government, as the Foreign Office reports, announced on 21 February that it had imposed sanctions on 6 Russian officials, fingered as allegedly responsible for the death of the dissident. And new details also emerge about the death: Navalny would have been killed with a punch to the heart, a technique used by former KGB special forces agents, after being exposed to freezing conditions for several hours, according to what the Times quoting Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net. While Leonid Volkov, head of staff of Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, connected to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, today said: “London has sanctioned 6 people, staff of the penal colony, who would never have traveled to the United Kingdom and they have assets abroad: now they laugh at these sanctions and so does Vladimir Putin. We have studied the corruption of Putin’s regime. Navalny himself has indicated the oligarchs friends of Putin who hold the cash and yet even now not all of them are sanctioned. If you want honor Alexei’s memory, hit Putin’s friends, seize their assets.”
Navalny’s team on Medvedev’s statements: “He will have to answer for them”
Medvedev, in an interview with the Moscow media then relaunched on social media by the spokesperson of the Navalny team, Kira Yarmysh, highlighted how the opponent’s widow has been seen around with a “smiling face” and “happy” since her husband died. “We will record her every word, we will not forget any of her, and then we will make him answerable for each one,” Yarmysh wrote on her profile X. Then came Navalnaya’s reaction too. “Why do you defend me from Medvedev? It’s nothing. They purposely propose to you a person who means nothing so that you can vent your anger on him. Write that Putin killed Alexei. Write it every day as long as you have the strength,” he wrote on X.