Yulia Navalnaya tells MEPs to 'stop being boring' to defeat Putin's regime

"If you really want to defeat Putin, you have to become an innovator. You have to stop being boring," Navalnaya said in a speech to lawmakers in Strasbourg.

"You cannot hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions that is no different to the last one," she added.

"You cannot defeat him by thinking he is a man of principle who has morals and rules. He is not like that. And Alexei realised that a long time ago. You are not dealing with a politician, but with a bloody monster."

Her speech, interrupted several times by applause, came less than two weeks after her husband Alexei Navalny, considered Putin's fiercest political foe, died in an Arctic penal colony following years of persecution at the hands of the Kremlin.

The exact circumstances of his passing remain unclear. The EU has directly pinned responsibility for his death on Putin's regime.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the bloc has imposed thirteen packages of sanctions aimed at suffocating Russia's ability to modernise its economy and cutting access to critical goods used on the battlefield in Ukraine.

High Representative Josep Borrell has vowed to rename the EU's human rights sanctions regime in Navalny's honour. 

But Navalnaya said the EU needs less symbolism and more targeted investigations focused on Putin's friends and associates, warning that Putin was continuing to hide money – and power – in EU capitals through organised crime networks.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation, the NGO that Navalny founded, has compiled a list of thousands of Russian officials, oligarchs and propagandists considered Putin's "bribetakers and warmongers," many of whom remain spared from Western sanctions.

The widow and activist also pleaded with MEPs not to give in to war