Alexei Navalny death latest: X restores wife Yulia’s account as Putin brings case against brother

Alexei Navalny issued a chilling warning about what a second presidential term for Donald Trump could mean in one of his final letters before he died in an Arctic prison last week.

In one 3 December letter to Evgeny Feldman, a photographer who covered his attempted run for president in 2018 and now lives in exile in Latvia, Navalny wrote that he feared that if anything should happen to President Joe Biden – a distinct possibility, he felt, given the American’s advanced age – “Trump will become president”.

To Navalny, a second Mr Trump term was a “really scary” prospect for the wider world. “Doesn’t this obvious thing concern the Democrats?” he asked Mr Feldman, apparently incredulous that 81-year-old Mr Biden is pursuing a second term rather than yielding to a younger successor to take on Mr Trump.

My colleague Joe Sommerlad has more in this report:

The European Union has summoned Russia’s representative to the bloc and called for an independent international investigation into the death Alexei Navalny.

The EU’s diplomatic service said a senior Brussels figure had also urged Russia to release Navalny’s body to his family without further delay at the meeting with Kirill Loginov, Russia’s acting permanent representative to the EU.

“The EU side conveyed the EU’s outrage over the death of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, for which the ultimate responsibility lies with President Putin and the Russian authorities,” it said.

Italy’s foreign ministry has summoned the Russian ambassador over the death of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, a spokesperson for the ministry has said.

Yulia Navalnaya has responded after Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov sought to characterise her accusations that her husband had been poisoned as “absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state”.

In her most recent post on X/Twitter, Ms Navalnaya said: “I don’t care how the killer’s press secretary comments on my words. Give back Alexei’s body and let him be buried with dignity, don’t stop people from saying goodbye to him.

“And I really ask all journalists who may still ask questions: don’t ask about me, ask about Alexei.”

The White House has announced that a new package of sanctions against Russia is set to go into effect following the death of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny in a Siberian prison camp.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said existing sanctions will be “specifically supplemented with additional sanctions regarding Mr Navalny’s death”.

While he noted that the US doesn’t yet know Mr Navalny’s cause of death, Mr Kirby went on to put the blame Mr Putin, telling reporters: “Regardless of the scientific answer, Putin’s responsible for it.”

My colleague Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, DC:

The US will announce a major package of Russian sanctions on Friday in response to the death of Alexei Navalny, the White House has said.

The package will “hold Russia accountable for what happened to Mr. Navalny” and for its actions over the course of the war in Ukraine, national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, was seen laying a bouquet of white flowers next to a picture of her son.

Social media site X has claimed it suspended the account of Yulia Navalnaya after mistakenly flagging it as “violating our rules”.

“Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged

@yulia_navalnaya  as violating our rules,” it wrote.

“We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”

They did not clarify in what way they mistakenly believed Ms Navalnaya had broken the rules.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry has said it had summoned Russia’s ambassador over the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“The ministry called on Russian authorities to take responsibility for the death of Alexei Navalny and conduct a full and transparent investigation to determine the circumstances and cause of his death,” the ministry said in a statement.