Good morning. In the days since the death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian penal colony, an urgent question has emerged: can anyone take up his mantle – or is opposition to Vladimir Putin bound to dissolve? Yesterday, Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, provided one answer in a video released on social media in which she accused the Russian authorities of murdering her husband and hiding his body. “I will continue Alexei Navalny’s work,” she said. “I call on you to stand with me.”
Navalnaya’s intervention was extraordinarily powerful, freighted with the grief and rage that she asked Russians to carry on her husband’s behalf. But with no obvious prospect of a meaningful challenge to Putin in March elections or in the years ahead, the task for her – and for the rest of Russia’s fractured opposition – is formidable.
