Yulia Navalnaya hails Russian prisoner swap while also admitting ‘deep sorrow’

Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny, released a video on Thursday in which she shared her thoughts on last week’s prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.

While Navalnaya celebrated the release of 16 mainly political prisoners by Moscow in the swap, she also expressed deep sadness that her husband, Alexey Navalny, had not been able to be among them.

“My husband, Alexey Navalny, was supposed to be on the plane flying first to Ankara and then to Cologne. We told you about this six months ago, right after he was murdered in the penal colony in Kharp,” she said, referring to her husband’s sudden death in an Arctic prison facility in February, just days before an earlier version of the exchange had been due to take place.

Navalny was previously slated to be exchanged for convicted Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Chechen dissident in 2019. “The very thought of Navalny being free was so terrifying to Putin that he decided to kill him,” Navalnaya said.

Navalnaya stressed that there were still hundreds of political prisoners in Russia, including Navalny’s lawyers Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Lipster and Igor Sergunin, as well as many more whose cases weren’t well known to the public, such as concert pianist Pavel Kushnir, who only attracted media attention following his death while on hunger strike on Saturday.

Stressing that a large-scale prisoner exchange had been considered unthinkable by many just a week ago, Navalnaya predicted that lesser-known political prisoners in Russia would one day also be released just as unexpectedly. "At some point, the same will happen with our country. The regime that today seems eternal and invincible will collapse suddenly and completely, in an instant,” she added.