On the evening of February 15, at the annual Munich Security Conference, Navalnaya was informed that negotiations were completed and her husband would be released within a week, the politician's widow herself revealed in an interview with the British newspaper The Times. But the very next day, his name appeared in the news feed on her phone. The headline read: "Alexei Navalny has died".
"I know how it works when negotiating with Putin. He lies all the time. That's why I never thought it could happen tomorrow. I knew we were very close to it — but I also knew that everything could be destroyed on the same day. That's why I'm very glad I didn't think about it much," said Yulia Navalnaya in an interview with the publication.
Putin himself first commented on Navalny's death and the preparation of the exchange only on March 18, stating that he learned about the exchange "a few days" before the politician's death. However, already in September, the magazine "Razvedchik" associated with the SVR wrote that the preparation for the prisoner exchange that took place in August had been underway for a year and a half, and Alexei Navalny's name was included immediately, furthermore, the publication claimed that the negotiations themselves began on Putin's orders.
Yulia Navalnaya told journalists that despite her husband's murder, exile, the need to hide her whereabouts, and move with bodyguards, she does not wish death upon Putin. "I want him to sit in a Russian prison, as my husband did. I want him to turn from a kind of tsar of Russia into an ordinary prisoner in Russia," Navalnaya stated.
* Included in the list of "terrorists and extremists".
Photo: NADAV KANDER/THE SUNDAY TIMES