Yulia Navalnaya intends to be president of Russia, she tells me. She looks me straight in the eye. No hesitation or wavering.
This, like so many of the decisions she made with her husband, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is unambiguous.
Navalnaya knows she faces arrest if she returns home while President Putin is still in power. His administration has accused her of participating in extremism.
This is no empty threat. In Russia, it can lead to death.
Her husband, President Putin’s most vocal critic, was sentenced to 19 years for extremism, charges that were seen as politically motivated. He died in February in a brutal penal colony in the Arctic Circle. US President Joe Biden said there was “no doubt” Putin was to blame. Russia denies killing Navalny.
Yulia Navalnaya, sitting down for our interview in a London legal library, looks and sounds every inch the successor to Navalny, the lawyer turned politician who dreamt of a different Russia.
As she launches Patriot, the memoir her husband was writing before his death, Yulia Navalnaya restated her plans to continue his fight for democracy.
When the time is right, “I will participate in the elections… as a candidate,” she told the BBC.
“My political opponent is Vladimir Putin. And I will do everything to make his regime fall as soon as possible”.
For now, that has to be from outside Russia.
She tells me that while Putin is in charge she cannot go back. But Yulia looks forward to the day she believes will inevitably come, when the Putin era ends and Russia once again opens up.
Just like her husband, she believes there will be the chance to hold free and fair elections. When that happens, she says she will be there.
Her family has already suffered terribly in the struggle against the Russian regime, but she remains composed throughout our interview, steely whenever Putin’s name comes up.
Her personal grief is channelled into political messaging, in public anyway. But she tells me, since Alexei’s death, she has been thinking even more about the impact the couple’s shared political beliefs and decisions have had on their children, Dasha, 23, and Zakhar, 16.
“I understand that they didn’t choose it”.
But she says she never asked Navalny to change course.
He was barred from standing for president by Russia’s Central Election Commission.
His investigations through his Anti-Corruption Foundation were viewed by millions online, including a video posted after his last arrest, claiming that Putin had built a one-billion dollar palace on the Black Sea.
The president denied it.
Yulia says: “When you live inside this life, you understand that he will never give up and that is for what you love him”.
Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020.
He was flown to Germany for treatment and the German chancellor demanded answers from Putin’s regime.
Navalny worked with open-source investigators Bellingcat and traced the poisoning to Russia’s security service, the FSB.
