July 27, 2024 at 14:30 on Embassy of Russia (Rua Visconde de Santarém 71, Lisboa) there will be a 🙋 69th Weekly protest
👨👩👧👦 March "Hello, it's Navalny!"
Tuesday, June 4th is Alexei Navalny's birthday. If Vladimir Putin had not killed him in prison, Alexei would have turned 48 years old on that day.
Navalny was killed a month before the united action of the Russian opposition “Anti-Putin Noon”, 2 weeks after he supported it. This action was carried out as a visual response to repression and falsification on the day of Putin’s pseudo-elections. On March 17, people gathered at the polling stations at noon in a line against Putin. According to the results of an exit poll conducted at the exit from the polling station at the Russian Embassy in Lisbon, Putin received only 9% of the votes in Portugal.
For millions of people, not only in Russia, Alexey was not just an important political figure, in many ways he was like a family member. Thanks to his spontaneity and the humor with which he overcame all the obstacles that Vladimir Putin put in front of him, he gave hope that this criminal regime could be defeated. This year we lost Alexey. Many still don’t want to believe that he is no more. But even more people want him to continue to live in us through his ideas and his unbending spirit.
There is a public memorial in memory of Alexei Navalny in Lisbon. It is located at Rua Visconde de Santarém 71. This memorial is regularly vandalized by local putinists: they draw symbols of the new Z-swastika, cut, break and steal this memorial. The same thing happens with memorials in memory of Alexei, which are created by activists around the world. The vandals hope to erase the memory of Alexei, because Putin believes that by killing Alexei and not receiving a revolution in return, he won.
We are restoring this memorial and are now coordinating with the relevant authorities for the installation of a vandal-resistant stone memorial at this site.
We believe that an important step would be to perpetuate the name of Alexey by renaming the part of the street on which the Russian Embassy is located in Lisbon. It would be logical to give it a name in honor of Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov also died fighting Putin and against the war in Ukraine - he was shot in the back on a bridge near the Kremlin wall in 2015, a few days before the Spring march. They prepared this march together with Navalny, and in it they demanded political freedoms, justice and an end to the war in Ukraine. We would like the representatives of the Russians, who are the embassy employees, as well as the Russians themselves, under any regime in Russia, when receiving and sending correspondence and when contacting the embassy, to remember the sacrifice of these people and their faith in a free, peaceful and prosperous Russia of the future.
On June 4 at 6 PM, the Associação de russos livres gathered at the Navalny memorial at Rua Visconde de Santarém 71. We put on masks with a portrait of Alexei and said “Hello, this is Navalny!” and marched with the music of musicians who spoke out against the war and with quotes from Alexei’s statements to Restauradores square. We want to say that the regime of Vladimir Putin is illegitimate, that the war he organized must be stopped, and troops withdrawn from the entire territory of Ukraine. And we want to call on Russians who are relatively safe abroad to be active, and Russians who are under pressure from Putin’s repressive to maintain the belief that victory over this regime is inevitable.
Alexey bequeathed to us not to give up. And we don't give up.
