Yulia Navalnaya is in Australia with a blunt message about Putin, the president who murdered her husband

Vladimir Putin brought fake criminal charges against Yulia Navalnaya just three months after murdering her husband in an Arctic prison.

Now that she’s the de facto leader of the Russian opposition, “nowhere is safe for me”, she says, even as she visits Australia for the first time. But she refuses to be afraid.

“I understand that Vladimir Putin, who starts wars, who poisons his political opponents, kills his political opponents, can do anything he wants. But that’s not reason to stop” her campaign for a free Russia, which she conducts from exile.

She’s tireless in seeking to keep alive the memory of her charismatic late husband, Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner killed in February last year at the age of 47, and to persuade governments to apply more and tougher sanctions on Putin and his regime. Not on Russia itself, she hastens to add, but on specific members of the “criminal regime”.

“I try not to think about my security or it starts to live in your mind,” she says.

In Australia as a guest of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, she is due to meet Australian leaders in Canberra on Wednesday.

As we spoke on Tuesday morning in an exclusive interview, news was breaking that Russia had deliberately endangered the aircraft of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen – the closest thing that Europe has to a prime minister. Moscow jammed her plane’s navigation system as she flew over Bulgaria.

Should Europe, the world, be angrier with Putin’s unceasing aggressions?

“I don’t think the Europeans should be angry, I don’t think the world should be angry,” she replies. “But I think the world should be braver about Putin.”

She recounts a conversation with an unnamed European official who told her that it was best to deal with the Russian dictator because post-Putin Russia could be even worse.

“This is a game that Putin likes to play, but, of course, it’s not true,” she says. “He’s already done everything he can – he’s taken the freedoms of the Russian people, he’s deeply corrupt, he steals elections, he imposes censorship on Russians, and when that didn’t work, he started to poison and imprison his opponents. He started the war, he killed my husband, last year he even started talking a lot about nuclear weapons.”

This was before warnings from the US, China and India appeared to persuade him to end his rhetoric of nuclear intimidation.

“He’s already done everything. People should be more brave and more confident against him.”

Not that she expects him to relent, to end his invasion of Ukraine: “When people start to commit crimes, they never stop. It’s important to stop the war and it’s also important to fight Putin’s regime because nobody knows where he will stop.”

US President Donald Trump has demanded that Putin make efforts toward peace under pain of “severe consequences”. Yet Putin only intensifies his lethal attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Is Putin playing Trump?

“I don’t know that it’s playing; Putin has his own agenda and it’s about getting what he wants,” she says.

Navalnaya points out that American presidents have come and gone and, after 25 years, Putin is still in power. “He is good at these intrigues, how to deal with politicians.”

She is unimpressed that Trump, by meeting Putin, is rehabilitating the Russian leader.

“We all want an immediate ceasefire and peace. Of course, this requires negotiations. But it is important not to show Putin at these negotiations that he is an equal. Leaders in democracies are chosen by their people. Who chose Putin?” Navalnaya says.

Putin’s agents famously tried to kill her husband by applying the nerve agent Novichok to his underwear before resorting to more direct methods in a prison yard. It is less known that Navalnaya also was the victim of a Novichok attack, though milder, on a separate occasion.

Putin’s thugs have detained her, raided her home and listed her as a terrorist. And now, although she’s based in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, he’s evidently still worried about her. She says that word reached her that his regime opened a new terrorism case against her just last week, although she’s had no official confirmation.

And worried he well might be. Navalny wrote in his memoir, Patriot, published posthumously last year, that “of the two of us, she holds even more radical views”, and that she hates the Putin regime “probably even more than I do”.

On Tuesday, she gave Putin yet more to worry about. The Anti-Corruption Foundation, founded by her husband and now headed by Navalnaya, revealed new details of assets held by members of Putin’s circle.

Former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky was found to have $US74.5 million ($114 million) worth of real estate in Moscow and Spain.

“Corruption,” Navalnaya says, “is in endless supply in Russia. You can take any minister, any governor, do your investigation and you find that every one is corrupt.”

The Anti-Corruption Foundation most notably exposed Putin’s luxurious, billion-dollar Black Sea palace, among many other disclosures. It is a priority target for his regime; it has opened 76 criminal cases over donations to the foundation in the last three years.

Government shutdowns of YouTube and other channels have made it harder for the opposition to publicise its findings. Russians are resorting to VPNs and other methods to skirt censorship, says Navalnaya.

But the power of its findings was revealed in June when the government of Canada imposed sanctions on every one of the 50 Putin friends and family named on the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s “Navalny List 50”. This included Putin’s ex-wife and cousins.

“Canada’s sanctions are world’s best practice,” Navalnaya says. “Countries like Canada and Australia are a little bit aside so you can pioneer on sanctions and things like that. It’s important to be innovative.”

Was Alexei Navalny right? Does his widow hate Putin’s regime even more than Alexei did?

“I wouldn’t say that I hate Putin. I don’t. I just want justice. A lot of people discuss about ‘will he be killed, when is he going to die’. I prefer that he be alive and go to prison one day,” she says.

“He would spend years in prison, and from prison he would watch how Russia becomes a normal country. A normal democracy. I don’t have a plan for a fairytale ending. A normal country. The people of Russia are absolutely ready.”

Navalnaya hasn’t decided whether to contest the presidency, as Alexei did. She does hope to return to her homeland. It will have to be after Putin.

“I never wanted to live abroad, to live in exile. I would do my best to participate in change to make Russia a normal country. In Russia, everything changes unpredictably: we do not know when it will happen — in a year, in 10 years, or never. But that is no reason to give up and do nothing.”

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