Nine days after Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, his body was finally handed over to his mother on Saturday for burial. The Russian authorities had been refusing to release his remains to her and his legal team while they claimed to be carrying out a ‘forensic examination’ to determine his cause of death.

The authorities’ decision to withhold Navalny’s body for more than a week was clearly a stalling tactic. His widow Yulia accused Putin of being directly responsible for this. ‘Murder was not enough for Putin. Now he is holding his body hostage,’ she said in a video address before the body was released.

To truly have a chance at figuring out what, and potentially who, killed Navalny, his body will have to be taken abroad for testing

Navalny’s mother Liudmila arrived in Kharp, the town near the ‘Polar Wolf’ colony where he was held, on the morning after the news of his death broke. For several days, the authorities sent her on a wild goose chase, giving her misleading information about which morgue Navalny had been sent to and whether his cause of death had been determined. On one occasion, the opposition leader’s team claimed that guards at the Salekhard morgue where his body was eventually located (30 miles away from the Polar Wolf colony) physically barred Liudmila from entering the building.

On Wednesday, Navalny’s mother was finally shown his body, but still was not allowed to take possession of the body. Instead, in a video posted to his YouTube channel on Thursday, Liudmila claimed that the committee investigating Navalny’s death started to threaten her. She felt compelled to film the video, she said, because ‘if I don’t agree to a secret funeral, they will do something to my son’s body’.

‘They are blackmailing me,’ she said, ‘and giving orders on when, where and how Alexei should be buried.’ According to her, the local authorities wanted to bury Navalny ‘secretly, without a funeral service’. ‘They want to bring me to the outskirts of some cemetery, to a fresh grave and say “Here lies your son”.’ Liudmila said that she refused those conditions, stating in her video that she wanted supporters to have an opportunity to say goodbye to him properly. She additionally said the committee had banned her lawyer from being present for most of their discussion.

After being shown Navalny’s body, his mother signed his death certificate – following this, the authorities were legally obliged to release his body to her. Instead they held it for another three days. Navalny’s death certificate stated his official cause of death: no longer a ‘detached blood clot’ or the vague ‘sudden death syndrome’ as the authorities had originally said, but rather natural causes.

No doubt his family will shortly try to carry out their own independent autopsy to determine reliably why he died. Confirming that his mother had taken possession of his body, Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmush said, ‘A funeral will take place. We don’t know yet whether the authorities will interfere to stop us holding it in the way the family wants to and as Alexei deserves.’ She promised to update supporters with more information when she had it.

Therein, then, lies the most probable reason as to why the authorities took so long to release his body and why they have gone to considerable efforts to threaten and cajole Navalny’s mother in the process. Their refusal to release Navalny’s body in a timely manner has further raised suspicions that the manner of his death was unnatural. His wife has alleged that the authorities were ‘waiting for the traces of yet another Novichok of Putin’s to go away’. In 2020, when Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, the Russian hospital refused to discharge him so he could be sent abroad for medical treatment – also in the vain hope that the nerve agent would disappear from his system before independent testing could be conducted.

The Kremlin correctly fears that a public funeral for Navalny will become a rallying point for supporters to once again protest his death – a secretive speedy burial would prevent this. In an unexpected parallel, Putin took similar measures after the suspicious death of the Wagner chief Evgeniy Prigozhin, who was killed after his plane crashed out of the sky last August. He was buried hastily with a hasty security presence; thanks to decoy funeral processions it wasn’t until the graveside service had begun that journalists were able to figure out where he was actually being buried.

Last weekend the news of Navalny’s death saw the biggest protest rallies across the country since Putin announced the ‘partial mobilisation’ of the army in September 2022. With the presidential election less than three weeks away, Putin will want as little as possible to threaten the illusion of a peaceful, legitimate vote.

Saturday served as a further taster of what might happen if a public funeral for Navalny takes place. The day coincided with the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: in cities across Russia, people lined up to lay flowers at memorials to victims of political repression and say a prayer in church. Some were brave enough to take to the streets with single pickets. There were reports of church-goers being followed inside by police; according to the human rights group OVD-Info, at least 52 people across the country were detained.

The next challenge for Navalny’s family will be how, when and where to bury him. They have expressed a desire to give supporters the opportunity to attend, but particularly now that Yulia has vowed to carry on her husband’s work fighting Putin’s corruption, returning to Russia would place her and her children in further danger.

To truly have a chance at figuring out what, and potentially who, killed Navalny, his body will have to be taken abroad for testing. His team would be hard-pressed to find a Russian laboratory that would provide reliable results – particularly if this means going against the Kremlin’s official line. The challenges of moving a body across hostile borders twice hardly need spelling out, but there is no obvious place abroad Navalny might be buried. His wish, undoubtedly, would be to be buried on Russian soil. Navalny’s family have some tough decisions ahead of them.