Alexei Navalny’s Team Says Russia Won’t Even Let Them Hold a Memorial
“We were told that the funeral agencies were forbidden to work with us.”
Reuters
Funeral agencies and public event halls have been forbidden from hosting a public memorial for the late Kremlin foe Alexei Navalny, his spokesperson said Tuesday.
“We have called most of the private and public funeral agencies, commercial venues and funeral halls,” Kira Yarmysh wrote on X. “Some of them say the place is fully booked. Some refuse when we mention the surname ‘Navalny.’ In one place, we were told that the funeral agencies were forbidden to work with us.”
The news comes just three days after Russian authorities finally handed Navalny’s remains over to his mother, Lyudmila, who had gone public last week about threats she said investigators made while demanding Navalny be buried in secret, without any kind of public farewell.
“Looking me in the eye, they told me if I don’t agree to a secret burial, they will do something with my son’s body,” she said in a video shared on social media, adding that one investigator “openly told me, ‘Time is working against you, the body is decomposing.’”
The opposition leader’s public memorial was initially planned for “the end of this work week,” Yarmysh said Monday, though it was not immediately clear if the difficulty in finding a venue might alter that timeline.
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