Yulia Navalnaya makes first post since death of husband, Alexei Navalny

Feb. 18 (UPI) -- Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of Alexei Navalny, made her first online post Sunday since the death of her husband at a Russian penal colony.

Navalnaya shared a picture of her with Navalny that she simply captioned, "I love you.

Her post came as OVD-Info, an independent human rights project in Russia, reported that at least 336 people have been detained in rallies across 39 cities since Navalny was "murdered." Around 13 people were detained on Sunday.

"Navalny's death was a murder -- a planned murder, a murder methodically carried out, a murder of which the Russian state is guilty. Including those very agencies that are now talking about investigations," OVD-Info said in a statement.

"And this was not just murder. It was a political assassination. Navalny's arrest and conviction were not simply unjust, they obviously served the political goals of the Kremlin."

Navalny was the main figure of opposition to the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin and an anti-corruption activist who survived a poisoning attempt in the Siberian city of Omsk in 2020.

After his poisoning, Navalny was taken for treatment to a hospital in Berlin, Germany, where officials said there was "unequivocal proof" that he was the victim of the nerve agent Novichok. Navalny and others pointed to Putin, but the Kremlin denied its involvement.

Despite barely surviving with his life, Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. He was promptly arrested and ordered to be held in pre-trial detention for allegedly violating the terms of a prior suspended jail sentence. The politician had previously received a suspended sentence for alleged embezzlement in July 2013 and again in 2014, widely viewed as politically motivated.

Navalny was ordered to serve two and a half years in prison in February 2021 for allegedly violating the terms of his parole for prior charges. After criticizing the war in Ukraine from his prison cell shortly after Putin invaded, Navalny was hit with another nine years in prison for alleged embezzlement and transferred to a maximum-security prison in the Vladimir region of Russia.

In April 2023, Navalny suffered from extreme stomach pain that his spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, suggested could have been the result from another poisoning attempt.

Navalny, already in prison, was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to another 19 years in prison in August. He then went missing in December, and was discovered to have been moved to a penal colony east of Moscow. He was found at the penal colony where he later died three weeks later.

He was last seen in a video link from a court hearing on Thursday, the day before his death.