CNN provided coverage of Russians chanting “We are many!” at Alexei Navalny’s funeral despite having their live signal blocked by the Russian government on Friday.
After noting that senior international correspondent Matthew Chance was unable to appear live on CNN News Central, John Berman played a clip of Chance reporting from the funeral that he had already filed.
According to Chance, thousands had turned out for the event despite the fact that they were not being allowed into the cemetery where Navalny was being laid to rest.
“They’re carrying flowers, they’re carrying messages, and they’re chanting slogans as well, periodically,” said Chance. Just a few moments later, the crowd broke into a chant of “We are many!”
“That is a really poignant message coming from these thousands of people that have come out today to pay their respects to Alexei Navalny. Because it’s not just a funeral, of course, it is an act of mass defiance and a very rare one in a country which does not tolerate, sort of, any kind of dissent and is increasingly less tolerant of any kind of dissent,” argued Chance. “So for people to come out and to voice those kinds of slogans, you know, it’s an enormous risk they’re taking. And we know that over the course of the past couple of weeks, people have been detained by the Russian
Navalny, the longtime Russian opposition leader who was poisoned by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in 2020, was immediately thrown in prison after returning to his homeland the following year. He died in a Russian prison camp under suspicious circumstances in February at the age of 47.
In addition to his journalistic work exposing corruption in the Putin regime, Navalny ran for the positions of the mayor of Moscow and president of Russia. He lost the first amid reports of electoral interference by Putin and was disqualified from competing in the second.