Russia adds Yulia Navalnaya to official list of ‘terrorists and extremists’

Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has added Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, to its official list of “terrorists and extremists.”

On July 9, a Moscow court announced it had issued an arrest warrant for Navalnaya, who currently lives outside of Russia, on charges of participating in an “extremist organization.”

The Russian state news agency Interfax, citing its own source, reported that investigators allege Navalnaya “created and distributed video clips on the Internet aimed at discrediting the authorities and raising money for the Anti-Corruption Foundation,” the organization founded by Navalny that Russia outlawed as extremist in June 2021.

Responding to the news of her arrest warrant on social media, Navalnaya asked journalists to remind readers that Vladimir Putin is a “murderer and a war criminal” and said his place is “in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague, in a cozy cell with a TV set, but in Russia, in the same kind of penitentiary and the same kind of cramped cell where he killed Alexey.”

Alexey Navalny and his associates were charged with creating and participating in an “extremist organization” in September 2021. The politician was later sentenced to 19 years in prison on these charges, and in February 2024, he died in the Arctic prison where he was serving this sentence.