She would stare them down, out-argue them, and bend their will to hers, all while a gathering swarm of journalists trained their cameras and microphones and smartphones on her. To enter his room, she would need to present a marriage certificate, they said, and secure verbal consent from Navalny, who was still unconscious and on life support. They were reinforced-or kept in line-by a small battalion of plainclothes federal security officers, all intent on keeping her from seeing her husband. At the hospital in Omsk, Navalnaya would encounter a wall of doctors who seemed more scared of their civilian superiors than they were of losing their patient. Her husband, she learned, hadn’t died, but the hardest was yet to come. “The most important thing is not to relax,” she felt, “to not show weakness.” It would stay with her for weeks. She had been preparing for this moment for a decade, and now it was finally here, pouring in with the sun on this warm summer morning. If the plane carrying her husband had to make an emergency landing 1,700 miles from its intended destination, Alexey’s life must have been in imminent danger. “Alexey has been poisoned, the plane landed in Omsk.” Navalnaya said “okay” and hung up. It was Kira Yarmysh, her husband’s press secretary, who was supposed to be midflight with Alexey. She wasn’t normally up that early, but she was preparing to go to the airport to meet her husband, Alexey Navalny, the sole remaining leader of the Russian opposition, whose flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk was scheduled to arrive in Moscow at eight that morning. It was 6:40 on the morning of Augwhen Yulia Navalnaya’s phone rang.
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