By Athena Papakosta

Supporters of Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny accuse the Kremlin of trying to cover his tracks more than three 24 hours after the death of the 47-year-old dissident and prominent critic of Moscow was announced last Friday.

His mother, Lyudmila Navalny, and his lawyer traveled over the weekend to the remote and harsh “Polar Wolf,” the Arctic Circle K-13 penal colony where Alexei Navalny was transferred nearly two months ago to retrieve his body. . Instead they received conflicting information and left without even seeing her.

Navalny’s mother was initially told that her son’s body had been taken to Salekhard, a town near the penal colony, but when she arrived at the morgue on Saturday, it was closed. “They drove us around, covering their tracks,” said Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Jarmis.

According to the head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which was founded by Navalny, his lawyer and his mother were informed that the authorities attributed the death of the prominent representative of the extra-parliamentary opposition in Russia to “sudden death syndrome”.

At the same time, a report by the independent website Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that Navalny’s body had been taken to the morgue of the Salekhand city hospital and, citing the testimony of a health worker, said that she had bruises – which could have come from convulsions – as well as signs that could have resulted from cardiac resuscitation efforts. However, an employee of the mortuary speaking to the Reuters news agency denied the above reports stressing that Navalny’s body has not been taken to it.

A veil of mystery also surrounds Alexei Navalny’s final hours with his allies and supporters demanding more information from Moscow.

With his post on the X platform (formerly Twitter), Alexei Navalny’s partner, Leonid Volkov, emphasized that in this penal colony the cameras record everything. “Every step he took was captured from every angle all these years (…) For two days now, not a single video has been leaked or published,” he noted.

For their part, Russian authorities report that Navalny felt unwell after being courted and almost immediately passed out in a prison in the city of Harp. They also report that despite the fact that an ambulance arrived and first aid was given to him, he could not be revived and that his cause of death is being investigated.

Western leaders are reacting to Navani’s death by accusing the Russian regime of being solely responsible without, however, presenting evidence.

“I don’t know exactly what happened to Navalny, but there is no doubt that his death was a consequence (of the actions) of Putin and his killers,” said the president of the United States, Joe Biden.

“The European Union considers the Russian regime to be solely responsible for this tragic death,” the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, said in a statement, while the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, pointed out that this is a “grim reminder of what Putin and his regime are.”

Navalny’s wife, Yulia, on Sunday evening posted a photo of them together on Instagram, writing “I love you”.

These are her first words since her first appearance at the Munich Security Conference last Friday, when, with tears in her eyes, she called on the international community to unite and fight the “terrorist regime” in Russia.

Today, Monday, he will attend the Council of Foreign Ministers of the European Union in Brussels and at 12:00 he will have a meeting with the President of the European Council.

So far at least 350 people have been arrested in Russia for participating in memorial events for Navalny, and many of them have already been sentenced to 14 days in prison. Everyone wants answers. However, the world – perhaps – will never know what happened to the most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s hegemony.