His team Alexei Navalny will keep alive his vision for change in Russia, his ally and spokeswoman said today Kira Jarmisin an interview he gave to the Reuters agency.

“We lost our leader, but we didn’t lose our ideas and beliefs,” Jarmis said, speaking via Zoom, from an undisclosed location.

The group, he added, held Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for what it called Navalny’s murder. She did not provide any evidence to support her claim, but recalled that in 2020 Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent in an assassination attempt, according to Western doctors.

At that time, Putin denied that the Russian state had tried to kill Navalny, saying it “would have finished the job” if it really wanted to kill him.

“We knew there was danger, Alexei knew it too. And yesterday they murdered him, as they planned three years ago,” Jarmis said.

Jarmis called on Western leaders to “put maximum pressure” on Putin over Navalny’s death and not to negotiate with him. As he said, Navalny was the symbol of hope that one day Russia “would become a normal democratic country, with fair elections, independent courts, free press (…) a peaceful and prosperous country”.

“Of course, everyone is devastated. Alexei was a man who collected all these ideas and fought for them. That’s why I’m sure his legacy won’t die with him and that people will come back to these ideas,” she concluded.