‘I love you’: Yulia, Alexei Navalny's wife, shares picture with late Putin critic

Navalny, 47, Vladimir Putin's fiercest critic, was found dead in a Russian prison on February 16.

In her first social media post since Alexei Navalny's team confirmed his death, Yulia, his widow, shared a picture on Instagram with her late husband, Vladimir Putin's fiercest critic.

Yulia Navalnaya's Instagram post.

The picture showed the couple's heads touching, as they watched what appears to be a musical performance.

“I love you,” Yulia Navalnaya, an economist by profession, posted on the social networking platform.

Navalny, 47, was found dead in a Russian prison on February 16. He was being held in one of Russia's ‘toughest penal colonies,’ a maximum-security jail in the Arctic Circle, on charges related to extremism and fraud. Imprisoned in January 2021, he was serving a 19-year sentence at the time of his death.

Navalny's imprisonment, however, was widely seen as an ‘act of retribution’ by Putin and the Kremlin.

‘Putin will not go unpunished’

Speaking at a security conference in Germany's Munich hours after Russian authorities announced that Navalny had died, Yulia Navalnaya, squarely blamed Putin, saying at the time that if the news of her spouse's demise was true, the Russian President would be ‘personally responsible.’

“I'd like Putin and all his staff to know that they will be punished for what they have done with our country, with my family and with my husband. We should fight this horrific regime in Russia today. Vladimir Putin should be personally held for all the atrocities they have committed in our country in the last years,” she said.

She added: “Putin and his government always lie. I want him, his entourage, friends, and government to know that that they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband. And this day will come very soon.”