Two portraits of Navalny were painted at the monument to Soviet soldiers in Vienna / Article

The spray-painted portraits were completed on Wednesday. They are located on the wall behind the monument to Soviet soldiers, which after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was already painted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag – blue and yellow.

The wall is part of the Schwarzenberg Palace (Palais Schwarzenberg), which belongs to the noble family of former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg. Schwarzenberg died last November.

The monument depicting a Soviet soldier was erected after Vienna was occupied by the Soviet army in 1945. Austria was divided into occupation zones from 1945 to 1955, until it regained full sovereignty in 1955.

“This monument commemorates the victims of the dictatorship, and Navalny is an obvious victim of the dictatorship,” Maksimilians Šafgočs, representative of the Schwarzenberg Family Foundation, told the Austrian news agency APA.

The portraits of Navalny were painted by the duo of Austrian graffiti artists “Joel Gamnou”. One of the duo’s artists, Jonathan Gamperl, stated that “we have only received positive feedback so far”.

The Coordination Council of Organizations of Russian Compatriots (KSORS), which is close to the Russian Embassy in Austria, lamented on Facebook that the wall behind the monument to Soviet soldiers is being “abused for political purposes.”

A makeshift Navalny memorial in front of the Russian embassy has been taken down twice in the past two weeks. The Vienna prosecutor’s office is considering whether to open an investigation into these incidents, APA reported.

CONTEXT:

The Russian Prison Service announced on February 16 that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had been imprisoned since 2021, had died in a correctional colony. Navalny was transferred to a special regime colony at the end of December last year, which was built in the 1960s on the site of the former Gulag camp.

Russian authorities claim that Navalny died of natural causes, but Navalny’s associates describe it as an assassination by the Putin regime.

After the news about Navalny’s death, the president of Latvia and the leaders of several other countries pointed to the Kremlin’s responsibility.

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