Second anniversary of Alexey Navalny’s death is marked around the world

The second anniversary of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s murder at a remote Arctic penal colony was marked around the world on Monday. 

Team Navalny reported that people had been coming to lay flowers at Navalny’s grave at Moscow’s Borisovsky Cemetery since Monday morning, with his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, and Yulia Navalnaya’s mother among the mourners. 

National guardsmen and masked counter-terrorism operatives were reportedly deployed at the cemetery, where those coming to pay their respects to Navalny included various European diplomats. 

In St. Petersburg, police detained a man for photographing the city’s fenced-off memorial to victims of political repression, human rights group OVD-Info said, which the authorities said was being repaired. In the southern Russian city of Volgograd, police detained a man for visiting a monument to victims of political repression, though he was later released without charge. 

Despite the risk of detention, people also came out to pay their respects to Navalny in the Russian cities of Vladivostok, Novosibirsk and Barnaul.

In the Georgian capital Tbilisi, police prevented a demonstration honouring Navalny’s memory from accessing the city’s monument to Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, though organisers were reportedly able to move the event to another location.

Team Navalny said that memorial events were being held in over 80 cities around the world on Monday, and that Yulia Navalnaya would attend an evening devoted to her late husband’s memory in Paris. 

After a joint statement was issued on Saturday by five European countries announcing that the high-potency neurotoxin epibatidine had been discovered in biomaterials secretly taken from Navalny’s body after his death and smuggled out of Russia for analysis, the Kremlin again roundly rejected the accusations on Monday. “We do not agree with them, we consider them biased and unfounded. Indeed, we strongly reject them,” spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. 

Navalny died suddenly in his cell shortly after returning from a walk at the remote Arctic penal colony where he was serving multiple custodial sentences on politically motivated charges, according to the official version of events.