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Putin Plays a Cat and Mouse Game with Navalny’s Corpse
If the Russians don’t finally take offense at this Stalinistic terror against their fellow citizens, then they deserve all the repression Putin’s system can serve up.
The woman dressed in layers of black clothing is the mother of Alexey Navalny. She is dressed in black because she is mourning. She is wearing multiple layers to protect herself from the bitter cold, which most likely was one of the main reasons her son succumbed to the tortuous conditions of his imprisonment. Her name is Lyudmila Navalnaya.
She has a simple message: Vladimir Putin, only you can command them to give me the body of my deceased son so I can bury him humanly and properly. For those of you who don’t speak Russian, the fact that she referred to him by his first and last name, avoiding his patronymic, expresses her disgust for her son’s sadistic killer.
Ms. Navalnaya is strong enough, despite her sorrow, to at least use the name of her son’s killer. Putin, the superstitious coward that he is, never says Alexey’s name. It’s like a child preferring not to say the name of a monster in a dark room for fear that the monster will come surging forward out of the deep shadows.