Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, has urged Ukrainians not to view the Russian opposition as the enemy after a speech she was giving at a conference in Lisbon was interrupted by Ukrainian activists on Tuesday.
As she began to speak on the Dictators and Digital Dissent panel at the Web Summit, one of the world’s biggest IT conferences, on Tuesday, Navalnaya was interrupted by activists setting off air-raid sirens and chanting “Stop Russia! Stop the war!”.
Ukrainian blogger Khrystyna Zhuk posted a video of the action on X, and thanked “all Ukrainians who joined this action. A Ukrainian woman took the stage, our voice was heard”.
In her Telegram post, Navalnaya said that after the disruption began she had invited one of the protesters to come up on stage and ask her a question, which the activist did, asking if she supported the war.
“Really? Is that what you’re asking me? But if I have to spell it out, I’m ready to say it again and again,” Navalnaya wrote. “I’m fighting against the Putin regime and I’m fighting against the war.”
Navalny fought against both Putin and the war, and was killed in prison for doing so, Navalnaya wrote, adding that her late husband had “used every court hearing as a platform for anti-war speeches, including the hearing on 24 February 2022,” referring to the date of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I also said that we only have one enemy. And Ukrainians don’t need to invent an enemy out of the Russian opposition,” Navalnaya concluded.
Navalnaya pledged to continue her husband’s work after his sudden death in an Arctic prison in February, and had repeatedly spoken out against the Kremlin’s policies and the war in Ukraine. However, in October, comments made by Navalnaya in an interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, in which she said it was “difficult to say” whether it was right to supply Ukraine with weapons, sparked widespread criticism.
“The war was unleashed by Vladimir Putin, but the bombs are also hitting Russians. Nevertheless, there must be a clear answer. All Russian troops must be withdrawn from the territory of Ukraine immediately. The war must end immediately,” Navalnaya told Die Zeit in October.