"Hi, it's Yulia Navalnaya..." By repeating the recognizable opening line with which her husband began his speeches – "Hi, it's Navalny!" – the Russian political opponent's widow indicated the path she intends to follow. "I'm going to continue Alexei Navalny's work, I'm going to keep fighting for our country," she vowed.

Navalnaya used her husband's YouTube channel to send a message to more than 6 million subscribers on Monday, February 19, three days after the prisoner's death. "I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't have to record this video," she said, her throat tight and her eyes red. "This role belongs to another person. But that man was killed by Vladimir Putin. Putin killed my husband. Putin killed the father of my children. (...) And, with him, Putin wanted to kill our hope, our freedom, our future."

"We will find out precisely who gave the orders and who carried out this crime. We will give their names and show their faces," she also promised, again echoing the words of her husband when he woke from a coma in September 2020 – a promise he kept.

Seeing Navalnaya make this commitment comes as no surprise to supporters and observers alike of the political opponent who died in prison. Although she remained in the shadows for years, Alexei Navalny's wife had always supported him and became increasingly influential after his August 2020 poisoning in Siberia.

At the time, her statements full of restrained anger and her fight to have him evacuated to Germany were striking. As was her dignified presence at his later trials and at demonstrations in support of her husband. Discreet, she could nevertheless joke with the same deadpan humor he was so fond of. Arrested at the end of January 2021, she joked to her million followers on Instagram: "Sorry for the poor quality. Very bad light inside the paddy wagon."

Alexei Navalny has never shied away from flaunting his marital and family happiness, particularly on social media, as if to mock the pompous declarations of the regime's mouthpieces, led by Putin, on "traditional values." The last message he was able to get out of prison, on February 14, was a declaration of love for his wife.

Trained as an economist at the prestigious Plekhanov University of Economics, Yulia, who married Alexei Navalny when they were both 21, worked for a time in banking, before joining her husband's parents' basket-making business. The couple had two children – Daria, 22, and Zakhar, 15.

"For many, she's Alexei without Alexei's problems, the old nationalist sympathies, the authoritarian character, the anger," summarized journalist Sergei Parkhomenko to Le Monde in February 2021. "She has the same courage, the same determination, but she's more consensual."

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