On Valentine’s Day, jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny asked his lawyers to send a message to his wife Yulia. “Baby, everything with us is like a song: between us there are cities, take-off lights of airfields, blue snowstorms and thousands of kilometers,” he wrote. “But I feel that you are near every second, and I love you with all my strength.” 

Two days later Navalny was dead. The news reached Yulia as she attended the Munich Security Conference – an annual meeting of some of the world’s most influential power brokers. Rather than rush to join her bereaved children immediately, Yulia asked the conference organisers to clear the schedule so she could address the delegates. 

“I want Putin and everyone around him – all Putin’s friends, his government – to know that they will be held responsible for what they’ve done to our country, to my family, and to my husband,” Yulia said, standing ramrod-straight, her voice strong. “I’d like to call on all the international community, on everyone present in this room, and on people around the world to rally together to defeat this … this horrific regime.”

Yulia Navalnaya’s dignity and her unshakeable faith in her husband and his mission have always been her trademarks. And, say friends of the couple, her support and loyalty were what allowed Navalny to continue his unequal fight against the vast repressive machine of Vladimir Putin’s security state. 

“Yulia is the rock on which Alexey stands,” Vladimir Ashurkov, one of Navalny’s closest aides, said at the time of his final arrest in 2021. “She’s got his back.” According to Yevgenia Albats, an old friend and political ally, “Navalny the politician is two people: Yulia and Alexei.” 

I saw the couple together on several occasions in Moscow. At a massive protest against Putin’s return to power on Moscow’s Sakharov Prospekt in December 2011 – probably the high water mark of open opposition to the regime – Navalny delivered a blistering speech to the 80,000 strong crowd denouncing Putin and his “party of thieves and crooks”. Wild applause kept interrupting him. After he came off stage he high-fived Yulia, who hugged him. Both were, understandably, beaming – in that moment it seemed that Russian history might be taking a different turn, led by Navalny’s vision of a democracy and justice. 

A few months later, after hundreds of protesters at subsequent meetings had been arrested and dozens of heads broken by baton-wielding OMON paramilitary police, I went to a private dinner with the Navalnys at the home of a journalist friend. Navalny continued to insist that his dream had not died, and instead spoke animatedly of his plans to run in the upcoming Moscow mayoral elections. His enthusiasm, dismissing doubts that the authorities would allow him to run, was infectious. “Iron-clad optimism,” was Yulia’s wry comment. “You’ll never persuade him it’s time to give up.” Her manner was charming but guarded, her intelligence and protectiveness towards her husband evident. But Yulia could be spiky, too. When conversation turned to a formerly opposition-minded journalist, who had joined the State-owned propaganda channel Russia Today, she was uncompromising in her condemnation. “He takes the Kremlin’s money,” she said. “What more is there to say?”

The Navalnys met on holiday in Turkey in 1998 when Alexei was a young real estate lawyer from a military family in the Moscow region who was just becoming involved in opposition politics. Both were 22 (Yulia is six weeks older than Alexei). Yulia also came from a middle-class Moscow family. Her father Boris Abrosimov was a scientist, her stepfather a mid-level apparatchik in the USSR State Planning Committee. She studied International Economic Relations at Moscow’s prestigious Plekhanov Economic Academy, did a masters degree and worked at a bank. “He immediately felt that I would be his wife,” Yulia said in one of her rare interviews, with the Russian edition of Harper’s Bazaar. They were married in 2000, and the following year Yulia quit her job to raise their first child Daria. Their son Zahar was born in 2008. 

From the beginning of her husband’s political career, Yulia was always a hands-on partner in his political activity. For years, she acted as Alexei’s press secretary and gatekeeper, editing his articles and speeches. Yet in public she always insisted that she saw her main role as a homemaker. “My main task is to make sure that, in spite of everything, nothing in our family changes,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “So that the children can remain children, and the house a home.” 

Navalny’s family life became part of his political brand. In contrast to Putin, who divorced his wife Lyudmila in 2013 and who was widely rumoured to be in a relationship with gymnast Alina Kabaeva, Navalny was happily married and frequently posted informal selfie photographs of himself and Yulia on social media. Putin, Tsar-like, sought to project himself as the embodiment of the power of the State. Navalny and Yulia were an ordinary, middle-class, loving couple.  

But Yulia’s humble-sounding role as a wife and mother was in fact a titanic battle to maintain a semblance of normality as agents of the Federal Security Service trailed her, her husband and their children. The FSB set up an observation station opposite their modest Moscow apartment. And as Navalny’s profile began to rise, so did his regular arrests on charges of hooliganism and organising illegal protests. 

It was Putin’s attempt to murder Navalny with nerve agent in August of 2020 that thrust Yulia, reluctantly, into the spotlight. Ignoring the advice of her husband’s aides she rushed to join him in hospital in Omsk, where his plane had made an emergency landing. She found the hospital packed with plainclothes FSB officers and terrified doctors who attempted to keep her away from her dying husband with ridiculous demands to see their original marriage certificate and even insisting that Alexei – then in a deep coma – had to give his permission. 

Yulia gave regular briefings to the world’s press outside the hospital – and when a medevac plane was sent from Germany by benefactors she shamed the Kremlin into giving permission for Navalny to be allowed to leave Russia. “Mr President, I am officially addressing you with a demand for permission to transport Alexey Navalny,” she wrote in an open letter to Putin that she read to the press. Even with her husband’s life on the line, Yulia refused to beg or ask anything of Putin but insisted on “demanding”.

There’s little doubt that Yulia’s actions in getting him into the care of the expert neurologists at Berlin’s Charite hospital saved her husband’s life. But Yulia’s tragedy is that she was unable – and maybe unwilling – to stop Navalny from returning to Russia after his recovery in January 2021, a fatal miscalculation that ended in his imprisonment and, ultimately, his death. 

The terrible tension between supporting her husband in his dangerous game of chicken with Putin and her desire to preserve their family was always at the forefront of her mind. Yulia was asked by a television interviewer in 2013 if she ever thought of asking Alexei to stop his activism for their family’s sake. “No, I’ve never in my life said anything like that to my husband because I understand that he’s not doing this for himself, he’s doing it for my children and for everyone else’s,” she answered. She did not worry about her children Dasha and Zakhar because “it’s them he’s fighting for”. In 2021 Navalny insisted that he had to return because he would lose the respect of his supporters if he remained in comfortable exile abroad. Privately, one of his top aides told me that he passionately disagreed and tried to dissuade him. But Yulia, at least in discussions in their inner circle, “never said a word against his decision”, the aide recalled. 

With Navalny dead, there has been talk of Yulia taking over his role as leader of the movement. Hitherto, she had always dismissed such talk. “I think it’s much more interesting to be the wife of a politician,” Yulia told Harper’s Bazaar before correcting herself. “Then again, what I do is, to a certain extent, also politics.” 

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the wife of the jailed leader of Belarus’ opposition, has risen to just such a role from exile in Vilnius, Lithuania – and, before Navalny’s return to Russia, encouraged Yulia “to begin her political career”. According to political analyst Konstantin Kalachev, “from the wife of a politician, [Yulia] is herself becoming a politician … she has charisma and charm, and can easily replace her husband.” Abbas Gallyamov, a political strategist, has compared Navalnaya to Corazon Aquino, the wife of the main opposition leader in the Philippines, who led protests against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos and eventually took power as his successor.

For the moment, Yulia Navalnaya has given no indication of whether she is willing to step into her murdered husband’s shoes. But it’s clear from her years of strength and unwavering commitment to the cause of freedom in Russia, that if she chooses to do so, she is ready.