Yulia Navalnaya probably could have stopped her husband from returning home in 2021, to his imprisonment and ultimately his death. Five months earlier the Russian opposition leader had been poisoned with novichok by President Putin’s secret agents in Siberia. Airlifted to Berlin, where doctors saved his life, he spent weeks in a coma and many more relearning to talk, write and walk, with his wife by his side. She was still by his side when they boarded a plane together to Moscow. Both knew it might be Alexei Navalny’s final act as a free man — but never once did she consider persuading him not to.
“I could have. I could have made a quarrel, shouting and everything. And he would have listened. And then we would have been living in exile, unhappy.”
