Screenshot from the video
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, thanked Russians for taking part in the Noon Against Putin campaign at the weekend and called on them to work “harder than ever before” to ensure Putin was not recognised as Russia’s legitimate president.
In a video message on Tuesday, Navalnaya urged supporters to not give up and advised them to follow her slain husband’s mantra of “15 minutes of fighting the regime per day”.
“We will make sure that nobody in the world recognises Putin as a legitimate president, that nobody sits down at the negotiating table with him, that Putin’s mafia should be fought like an organised crime organisation, so that everyone understands that Putin is not Russia,” Navalnaya said.
Navalnaya added that participants in the Noon Against Putin action, which saw those opposed to Putin head to the polls en masse at noon on Sunday to show the scale of would-be opposition voters, were “the real winners of the event that the Kremlin claims was an election”.
Last weekend’s Russian presidential election, which has been widely dismissed as a sham by the international community, handed Vladimir Putin his fifth term in office with 87.28% of the vote, while none of the three other Kremlin-approved candidates on the ballot got more than 5% of the vote.
