Wife of opposition leader Putin accepts Oscar for documentary about his assassination attempt
The wife of a Russian opposition leader jailed for speaking out against Vladimir Putin delivered an emotional message onstage at the Oscars on Sunday after a documentary about her husband’s life took home an Academy Award.
Taking the stage to accept the statue along with the film’s director, Yulia Navalnaya – the wife of the currently jailed Alexey Navalny – criticized Moscow not only for its military invasion of Ukraine, but for its alleged assassination attempt on Navalny in 2020. , around which the film develops. is centered
With the same title NAVALNY, the documentary details Putin’s alleged attempt on Navalny’s life and the United Russia opponent’s subsequent attempt to track down his assailants as he recovered from being poisoned in a German hospital.
Upon his discharge, Navalny accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning, and a subsequent investigation implicated agents of the Federal Security Service as responsible for the incident.
Airing these accusations to his more than 6 million followers, Navalny he returned to Russia in early 2021, only to be immediately jailed by the Kremlin.
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Taking the stage to accept the statue along with the film’s director, Yulia Navalnaya used her time to condemn Moscow not just for its invasion of Ukraine, but for the 2020 attempt on the life of her imprisoned husband.
Today, more than two years after her arrest, Navalnaya’s husband, Alexey, remains incarcerated, a fact the minds behind the film sought not to lose in shuffling through the bells and whistles of the 95th Academy Awards ceremony. Academy.
With the same title NAVALNY, the documentary details Putin’s alleged attempt on Navalny’s life and the United Russia opponent’s subsequent attempt to track down his assailants as he recovered from being poisoned in a German hospital.
Officials would later say that the 46 years The political theorist’s imprisonment stemmed from his hospital stay violating his probation for a 2014 embezzlement arrest.
At the time, many criticized the arrest as misguided and the culmination of a politically motivated campaign aimed at barring him from running against Putin in future elections.
Now, more than two years after his arrest, the opposition leader remains jailed, a fact that both the minds behind NAVALNY and Navalny’s wife tried not to get lost amid the bells and whistles of the 95th Academy Awards ceremony.
Taking the stage moments after NAVALNY collected the Best Documentary award, Navalnaya said she is “dreaming of the day” when both Russia and her husband “will be free.”
“My husband is in prison just for telling the truth,” Navalnaya said Sunday, joining director Daniel Roher and several other members of the film’s staff in accepting the award.
The 46-year-old so-called Russian opposition First Lady proceeded to use the glitzy venue as a platform to shed light on her husband’s current situation.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is seen on a video link from a prison, during a court session in December 2021.
“My husband is in prison just for defending democracy,” she said, before addressing her husband directly.
‘Alexey, I am dreaming of the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love. Thank you.’
Navalnaya’s brief comments were accompanied by a similar message from the film’s director, whose work details overwhelming evidence to suggest that Navalny’s 2020 assassination attempt stemmed from his opposition to the Kremlin.
Praising Navalny as a hero and “the leader of the Russian opposition,” Roher, a documentary filmmaker from Canada, raised the issue of his film’s apparent absence in accepting the statue.
“There’s one person who couldn’t be with us here tonight,” Roher said as he accepted the Oscar at the ceremony in Los Angeles.
“Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, remains in solitary confinement for what he calls, I want to make sure his words are exactly right, Vladimir Putin’s unjust war of aggression in Ukraine,” Roher said, citing the now famous Russian figure, whom he credited for the film’s critical acclaim.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has for years criticized Putin, who in 2021 chose to jail the opposition leader for violating the terms of his probation by seeking treatment in Berlin after he was allegedly poisoned.
‘I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all the political prisoners in the world. Alexey, the world has not forgotten your vital message to all of us,’ said the 30-year-old director.
‘We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictatorships and authoritarianism wherever it rears its head.’
Coming soon as Roher’s fourth feature, NAVALNY recounts the 2020 attempt on Navalny’s life carried out with the same family’s deadly nerve agent as one used to poison former Putin agent turned SAS spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in 2018.
After Navalny came forward to allege that Putin’s office played a role in the alleged assassination plot, international officials also cited “unequivocal evidence” from toxicology tests that Navalny was poisoned, leaving him in a coma.
Those experts have since demanded that the Russian government provide an explanation for the event and Navalny’s imprisonment just months later, after the head of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Foundation finally regained consciousness.
The film uses a combination of physical evidence and expert accounts to connect the botched assassination with the Kremlin, which has maintained that Navalny’s sentence is fair.