Yulia Navalnaya Meets with His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros
On October 18, 2024, Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the late Alexie Navalny and chairperson of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), visited with His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros at the Archdiocesan headquarters: the visit underscored the Archbishop’s affirmation of the right of all human persons, as beings created in the image of God, to equal and fair treatment under their respective nations’ laws. Alexie and Yulia Navalny worked tirelessly to hold accountable those who abuse political power. Mr. Navalny, who was arrested on multiple occasions, poisoned with a soviet-era nerve agent, and ultimately imprisoned for a term of 19 years in one of Russia’s most extreme labor camps—located north of the Arctic Circle—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against rampant corruption, abuse of power, and threats to civil rights. Alexei Navalny’s memoir, which will be released this coming Tuesday, serves as his “final letter to the world” and outlines the stakes for which his wife continues to fight (Penguin Random House).
Mrs. Navalnaya will be presented with the 2024 Athenagoras Human Rights Award by the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at this year’s Annual Archon Weekend. Despite an arrest warrant issued in absentia by a Russian court on charges of “extremism,” Navalnaya has effectively assumed the leadership of the Russian Opposition that her late husband led. Not only has Navalnaya raised her voice in defense of both human rights and a transparent and fair election process, she has also publicly called out President Putin on multiple occasions: first by posting her petition to President Putin to have her poisoned husband flown to Germany for testing and treatment, and more recently in a post on X in which she named Putin as a criminal and a murderer. In the face of her open arrest warrant—on the same charge as that which resulted in her husband’s imprisonment and subsequent death—together with the knowledge of Putin’s history of assassinating those who oppose him (regardless of infringement upon sovereign soil), her persistence in speaking truth to those in power recalls the steadfastness of Russia’s new martyrs of the Stalinist regime.
Photo: GOARCH/ Panagos.
