Yulia Navalnaya, wife of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, told BBC News that she intends to run for president of Russia when Vladimir Putin is no longer in power, on Monday, the 21st of October, reports Politico.
When the time is right, “I will stand for election… as a candidate,” Navalnaya said in the interview.
“My political opponent is Vladimir Putin. And I will do everything to bring his regime down as soon as possible,”
she said, adding that her return to Russia was “unfortunately impossible” as long as Putin was in power.
In August, a Russian court sentenced Navalnaya in absentia to two months in prison for involvement in an extremist organisation. She now lives outside Russia but would face immediate arrest if returned.
Alexei Navalny was Putin’s biggest fear over the past decade, but he died in February in a penal colony where he was serving a 19-year prison sentence. Navalnaya has repeatedly accused Putin of ordering her husband’s murder, but the Kremlin has denied this.
Yulia called the international community’s reaction to his death a “joke” and urged them to be “a little less afraid” of Putin and that she would like to see Putin behind bars.
“I don’t want him to be in prison, somewhere abroad, in a nice prison with a computer, good food… I want him to be in a Russian prison. Not only that, I want him to be in the same conditions as Alexei. This is very important to me,” she said.
Yulia Navalnaya reaffirmed her plans to continue her husband’s fight for democracy on the occasion of the release of Patriot, the memoir her husband wrote before his death.
According to the BBC, in the memoirs, Alexei Navalny admitted only once that he felt “crushed”. Nevertheless, Yulia never once believed that the regime could break him, and she said she was “absolutely convinced” that this was the reason why they decided to kill him.
“They just realised that he would never give up,” she said.
In an interview with The Times published on Sunday, Navalnaya said she did not hate the Russian president and “did not want Putin dead”, but also mentioned that she would like to see him “in a Russian prison, like my husband”.