Yulia Navalnaya: ‘The West has been playing games with Putin for years’
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Yulia Navalnaya, widow of former opposition leader Alexei Navalny, tells The News Agents why she is carrying on his political legacy after his death, and why the international community was too late to condemn Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia.
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Read time: 4 mins
In brief…
- Yulia Navalnaya tells Emily Maitlis that she will run for president in Russia, but can’t do so until Putin is dead, or long gone from the post.
- She says Putin’s only strength is to keep the people of Russia living “in fear” and knows his popularity is slipping.
- The West has been playing “games” with Putin in treating him like any other leader, and that sanctions after the Ukraine invasion came too late.
Can Navalnaya replace Putin?
Yulia Navalnaya intends to become the president of Russia. But this, she says, cannot happen until Vladimir Putin is dead, or no longer in power.
She is the widow of Alexei Navalny, the former leader of the Russian opposition who was poisoned with Novichok, imprisoned and eventually died in suspicious circumstances in a Russian corrective colony in the Arctic Circle in February 2024..
Navalnaya is among the many people who believe Putin was directly responsible for her husband's death. But since she is unable to return to Russia, she is unable to bring the political change her husband fought for until Putin is gone.
"I'm not just able to come back to Russia because it's obvious now they open several criminal cases against me and I will be arrested in the airport," she tells Emily Maitlis on The News Agents.
"I am going to participate one day in an election campaign.
"A lot of people believed that one day he [Navalny] would become a president."
Yulia Navalnaya: 'One day good changes will come to Russia'
What does she make of Putin’s leadership?
Putin is the longest serving Russian president since Joseph Stalin, but Navalnaya says this does not mean he leads the country well.
"I don't think that Putin is a strong leader, keeping people in fear," she says.
"People in Russia then live under huge understanding that they could be repressed for a lot of things, for a 'like' on social media, for such a post where they write, 'no war'.
"But still, he's not a strong leader. He's the person who's kept power for more than 25 Years, and who brought our country, in many ways – politically, economically, internationally – down for many years."
She says he is aware of his slipping popularity in Russia, but is continuing his war in Ukraine as a means to holding onto power.
"He's doing such strange things, some people call him crazy. I'm not sure that he's crazy, but he just does what comes in his mind," she adds.
"I don't think anybody, even around him, knows what he wants to do tomorrow and what will come to his mind tomorrow."
Yulia Navalnaya: 'The West has pretended Putin was elected president'
How do Russians view Putin’s war in Ukraine?
She says there are many people in Russia against the war in Ukraine, but that propaganda in the country is "very strong".
Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, leaders in the west have condemned his actions, and placed sanctions on Russia.
But Navalnaya says this came too late.
"It's not about the current moment. It's about the past," she says.
"They needed to do it before, when they knew about all these policies, when they knew that he was opening cases about his political opponents, when he started to send them to prison."
"I think the biggest problem is, for many years, the west was trying to play games with Putin, pretending that he's elected president, closing their eyes on all Putin's corruption, and inviting him to the international events."
America votes for its next president on 5 November, and Republican candidate Donald Trump has promised he has "a plan" for ending the war in Ukraine, although no details of this are known.
Does Trump represent a threat to American democracy?
There are concerns about what a second Trump presidency could mean for the region, having previously praised Putin and his presidency.
Navalnaya says she has faith in the democratic institutions of America, no matter the outcome of the upcoming election.
"I think that Americans will make the right choice, and they have independent media, independent courts. They have Congress, they have Senate, and it means a lot," she says.
"So these democratic institutions are able, it seems to me, to keep the situation under control.
I don't know if I could call it jealous about all these, because we never lived in such an atmosphere, at least in the last 25 years."
What does the future hold for Russia?
She also remains optimistic about the future for Russia.
"I'm very sure that one day the good changes will come to our country, the war in Ukraine will be stopped," she says.
"We'll probably very slowly become a normal European country who cares about their citizens, who doesn't start wars with their neighbours and just live their normal life."
Navalnaya recently released the memoir Alexei Navalny was writing before his death, Patriot, which he began while he was imprisoned, and allowed access to a pen and paper for only half an hour a day.
She says he admired other writers so much that he wasn’t sure of his own capabilities in writing his book – but that changed after the poisoning, and the realisation that life can change in an instant.
“That's why he started to write. He felt mortal,” she says.
"He was a special one, and unfortunately, the rest of the world will know it after his death."
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