Russian Court Orders Arrest of Navalny's Widow

Less than five months after dissident Alexei Navalny died in a Russian penal colony, authorities are making a push to lock up his widow. A court in Moscow on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant in absentia for Yulia Navalnaya on extremism charges, reports the BBC. Navalnaya is living somewhere abroad, and she assumed her husband's role as a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin upon her husband's death. The charges against her were not specified, but the AP notes that they appear to be linked to Russia's designation of Navalny's Foundation for Fighting Corruption as an extremist group. In response to the warrant, Navalnaya did not exactly sound intimidated.

"When you write about this, please do not forget to write the main thing: Vladimir Putin is a murderer and a war criminal," she tweeted, as translated by the New York Times. "His place is in prison, and not somewhere in The Hague, in a cozy cell with a TV, but in Russia—in the same colony and the same two-by-three-meter cell in which he killed Alexei." The Times notes that Navalnaya also seemed to mock the warrant, noting that it refers to her as an "extremist" and skipped the usual interim step of labeling her a "foreign agent." (More Yulia Navalnaya stories.)