Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “responsible for Navalny's death,” and told Yulia and Daria Navalnaya that he would announce major new sanctions on Friday to hold Russia accountable. The White House published a photo of the president embracing Navalny's widow.
Earlier on Thursday, Navalny's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, claimed that Russian authorities had tried to “blackmail” her into holding a secret burial for her son, after they finally allowed her to see his body for the first time since his sudden death in prison last. Friday.
A White House statement said that Biden expressed his admiration for Navalny's extraordinary courage and his legacy in the fight against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to everyone.
Biden said Navalny's legacy will live on through people across Russia and around the world mourning his loss and fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights.
Lyudmila Navalnaya (69 years old), whose son was Putin's fiercest rival, said in a video clip posted on YouTube that the Investigative Committee in the northern Russian town of Salekhard, near the prison where he died, still refuses to hand over the body to it while it is pressuring it. Her to a secret burial.
According to Navalnaya's account, an official of the Salekhard Investigative Committee took a tough approach in an attempt to force her to agree, warning her that her son's body would decompose if she did not agree to the committee's terms.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny's press secretary, said authorities had issued her a death certificate saying Navalny died of “natural causes.”
Officials' struggle to prevent a public funeral indicates the Kremlin's sensitivity that the burial could become a focus of attention for Navalny's supporters, hundreds of whom risked arrest in cities across Russia to pay their respects by laying flowers at makeshift memorials.
Ivan Zhdanov, a senior Navalny aide, spoke of unusual disputes over the funeral, involving the powerful head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin.
Bastrykin was one of the main figures behind Navalny's legal harassment over the years, including as a driving force behind a series of criminal cases that international human rights groups have condemned as political persecution.
Meanwhile, Russian state television propaganda officials warned Thursday that Yulia Navalnaya faces arrest if she returns to Russia.
Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to continue her husband's campaign for democracy in Russia, and in a post Wednesday on X, formerly known as Twitter, she bluntly accused Russia's authoritarian leader of killing him. “Putin killed Alexei,” she wrote.
Putin is certain to secure another term in the well-run presidential election scheduled for next month, and in his latest show of bravado he made a flight on Thursday aboard a Tu-160M strategic bomber — a photo opportunity described by pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov said it was a message to the West: “We are ready to use nuclear weapons against you to protect Russia.”
Navalny's mother said Thursday that she was finally allowed to see the body the night before. But she was secretly taken away and separated from her lawyer.
“Last night they secretly took me to the morgue where they showed me Alexei,” Lyudmila Navalnaya said, adding that she had signed the death certificate required to retrieve his body.
“By law, they are supposed to hand over Alexei’s body to me immediately, but they have not done that yet,” she said in a video message addressed to her son’s supporters. “Instead, they are blackmailing me, setting conditions about where, when and how to bury Alexei. This is illegal.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov twice missed his usual daily conference call with journalists, as the fight over the body continued. On Thursday, a number of Russian celebrities and historians sent letters to Putin, demanding that Navalny's body be handed over to his family.
According to Zhdanov, Investigative Committee officials have offered a plane to fly Navalny's body to Moscow — but only if family members keep the matter quiet, to prevent crowds of supporters from flocking to the airport.
Russian authorities appear keen to avoid dangerous scenes at the funeral of famous Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in December 1989, when tens of thousands of Russians attended an open-air mass and the funeral procession moved for hours slowly through the streets of Moscow, followed by a crowd of people. A large crowd of supporters on foot.
In stark contrast to Sakharov's burial under Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, hundreds of Navalny's supporters were arrested simply for paying their respects by laying flowers at makeshift memorials. Some of them were also handed military summonses.
In her statement to her son's supporters, Lyudmila Navalnaya detailed the hours she spent negotiating with officials without a lawyer as they tried to set conditions for a private funeral attended only by family.
“They want it to be done secretly, without saying goodbye. They want to take me to the edge of the cemetery to a new grave and say: ‘Here your son lies.’ ‘I don’t agree to that,’ she said. ‘I want you, Alexei who is dear to you, who was His death is a personal tragedy for you, to have the opportunity to say goodbye to him. “I am recording this video because they started threatening me.”
She continued: “They looked me in the eyes and said that if I did not agree to a secret funeral, they would do something with my son's body.”
“I don’t want special conditions,” Navalnaya said. “I just want everything to be done according to the law. I ask you to give me my son’s body immediately.
In a sign of fear among Putin's supporters – and perhaps the Kremlin – Yulia Navalnaya has become the target of a storm of misinformation, with claims spreading on social media that she could not suppress a smile when she appeared at a Munich security conference shortly after receiving treatment. News of his death.
Since then, other false posts by pro-Kremlin figures on Telegram and X have accused her of “cheating” or having an affair.
The first Russian attacks on Navalnaya were preceded by her dramatic video announcement on Monday that she planned to continue her husband's work resisting Putin's regime, and her accusation that the Russian leader poisoned him.
Western governments have pledged to impose more sanctions to punish Russia for Navalny's death. On Wednesday, Britain imposed largely symbolic sanctions on officials at Polar Wolf Prison.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's Security Council, told Russian journalists on Thursday that he had “nothing good” to say about Navalny, before discrediting Navalnaya.
“Look at the happy smiling face of Navalny’s widow,” Medvedev said. “It seems that she has been waiting for this event all these years to reveal her political career,” Sad said.
An investigation by Navalny's team concluded that Medvedev, while on a government salary, amassed a huge portfolio of expensive properties, which oligarchs allegedly gave him as bribes.
Navalnaya He responded By saying that she does not need anyone to defend her against Medvedev, whom she described as a “waste of space.”
“They are deliberately giving you this fool so you can vent his anger,” Navalnaya wrote on the X website, where in recent days she has gathered more than 300,000 followers. “Write that Putin killed Alexei. Write every day. As long as you have the energy.”
Pro-Kremlin accounts on X posted a digitally altered 11-year-old photo of Navalnaya, aimed at discrediting her, as part of a disinformation wave.
The original photo showed her happily hugging her husband when he was released by a Kirov court in 2013 after he was convicted on trumped-up fraud charges. The edited photo replaced Navalny's smiling face with that of Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a Russian businessman based in London who left the country in 2009.
One of the strongest blows received by Navalny's widow came from RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
“Look, when the wife comes out two hours after the news of her husband’s death and she is wearing makeup, look, the girls will understand, her mascara didn’t even run. “It is very difficult to manage,” Simonyan told state TV anchor Vladimir Solovyov on Sunday, two days after Navalny’s death.
“And he smiles at a press conference. “Well, to me, it shows that she didn’t love her husband very much,” Simonyan added.
In his online program “Full Contact,” Solovyov accused Navalny of creating a “totalitarian sect” that threatened Russia, and said that his widow, too, would end up in prison in Russia if she returned to her homeland.
“She has already said enough and done enough to be sent to prison,” he warned.
Meanwhile, in Russia's latest aggressive tone, Medvedev said on Thursday that Moscow is capable of occupying Kiev “if not now, then at another time,” because it is under the control of US-led “international bandits.”
“This regime must fall,” he said, reiterating Moscow’s determination to overthrow the Ukrainian government. “It must be destroyed. He must not remain in this world.”
Natalia Abakumova and Marie Ilyushina in Riga contributed to this report.
