RIGA, Latvia — President Biden met Alexei Navalny’s widow and daughter, Yulia and Daria Navalnaya, in San Francisco on Thursday and expressed his condolences, after the Russian opposition leader’s team said that the official death certificate recorded his death in prison as being due to “natural causes.”
Navalny’s family and his team say he was murdered and that authorities have refused to release his body so as to cover up any evidence.
Biden has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “responsible for Navalny’s death,” and he told Yulia and Daria Navalnaya that he would announce major new sanctions on Friday to hold Russia accountable. The White House released a photograph of the president embracing Navalny’s widow.
President Biden met with the widow and daughter of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in California on Feb. 22. (Video: Billy Tucker/The Washington Post)
Earlier on Thursday, Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, alleged 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 Biden expressed his admiration for Navalny’s “extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to everyone.”
Navalny’s legacy, Biden said, would carry on through people across Russia and around the world mourning his loss and fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, whose son was Putin’s most formidable rival, said in a video posted on YouTube that the Investigative Committee in the northern Russian town of Salekhard, near the prison where he died, was still refusing to release the body to her while pressuring her for a secret burial.
According to Navalnaya’s account, one Salekhard Investigative Committee official took a tough approach trying to force her agreement, warning her that her son’s body would decompose if she did not agree to the committee’s terms.
The authorities issued her a death certificate saying Navalny had died of “natural causes,” Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said.
The struggle by officials to prevent a public funeral indicates the Kremlin’s sensitivity that the burial could become a focus for Navalny’s supporters, hundreds of whom have risked arrest in cities across Russia to pay their respects by laying flowers at makeshift memorials.
A top Navalny aide, Ivan Zhdanov, detailed extraordinary wrangling over the funeral, involving the powerful head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin.
Bastrykin has been one of the key figures behind Navalny’s legal harassment over the years, including as a driving force behind a series of criminal cases condemned by international rights groups as political persecution.
Meanwhile, Russian state television propagandists warned Thursday that Yulia Navalnaya faces arrest if she returns to Russia.
Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to carry on her husband’s crusade for democracy in Russia, and in a post Wednesday on X, formerly known as Twitter, she bluntly accused the authoritarian Russian leader of killing him. “Putin killed Alexei,” she wrote.
What to know about Yulia Navalnaya as she vows to take on Vladimir Putin
Putin is certain to secure another term in a highly managed presidential election due next month, and in his latest show of bravado he took a flight Thursday on a Tu-160M strategic bomber — a photo opportunity that pro-Kremlin commentator Sergei Markov described as a message to the West: “We are ready to use nuclear weapons against you to protect Russia.”
Russia’s leading activist against President Vladimir Putin died in a Russian prison colony on Feb. 16. (Video: Zoeann Murphy, Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
Navalny’s mother said Thursday that she was finally allowed to see the body the previous night, but was taken in secret and separated from her lawyers.
“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 recover his body.
“By law, they’re supposed to give me Alexei’s body immediately, but they haven’t done that up to now,” she said in the video message addressed to her son’s supporters. “Instead, they are blackmailing me, setting conditions on where, when and how Alexei should be buried. This is illegal.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has twice skipped his usual daily conference call with reporters, as the struggle over the body has continued. On Thursday, a number of Russian celebrities and historians posted messages to Putin, demanding that Navalny’s body be delivered to his family.
For many young Russians, dreams of democracy died with Alexei Navalny
According to Zhdanov, Investigative Committee officials offered a plane to fly Navalny’s body to Moscow — but only if family members kept it quiet, to prevent crowds of supporters flocking to the airport.
Russian authorities appear anxious to avoid the momentous scenes at the funeral of the renowned Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in December 1989, when tens of thousands of Russians attended an outdoor service, and a funeral cortege moved for hours slowly through the streets of Moscow, followed by a massive crowd of supporters on foot.
In a striking contrast to Sakharov’s burial in the era of Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, hundreds of Navalny’s supporters have been arrested merely for paying respects by laying flowers at makeshift memorials. Some were also handed military summonses.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, in her statement addressed to her son’s supporters, detailed hours spent in negotiations with officials without a lawyer as they tried to set conditions for a private funeral with only family present.
“They want it to be done secretly, without a goodbye. They want to bring me to the edge of the cemetery to a fresh grave and say, ‘Here lies your son.’ I don’t agree to that,” she said. “I want you, to whom Alexei is dear, for whom his death was a personal tragedy, to have an opportunity to say goodbye to him. I am recording this video because they started threatening me.”
“Looking me in the eyes, they say that if I do not agree to a secret funeral, they will do something with my son’s body,” she continued.
“I don’t want special conditions,” Navalnaya said. “I just want everything to be done according to the law. I demand that you give me my son’s body immediately.”
In a sign of apprehension among Putin’s supporters — and perhaps the Kremlin — Yulia Navalnaya has become the target of a blizzard of disinformation, with claims circulating on social media that she could not suppress a smile when she appeared at the Munich Security Conference shortly after receiving the news that he had died.
Since then, other false posts by pro-Kremlin figures on Telegram and on X have accused her of “betraying” him or having an affair.
The first Russian attacks on Navalnaya preceded her dramatic video announcement Monday that she planned to continue her husband’s work resisting Putin’s regime, and her accusation that the Russian leader had him poisoned.
Western governments have pledged to impose more sanctions to punish Russia over Navalny’s death. On Wednesday, Britain imposed penalties, largely symbolic, on officials at the Polar Wolf prison.
Navalnaya steps up to lead fight vs. Putin as morgue retains her husband’s body
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, told Russian journalists Thursday that he had “nothing good” to say about Navalny, before smearing Navalnaya.
“Look at the smiling, happy face of Navalny’s widow,” Medvedev said. “It feels like she’s been waiting for this event all these years to unfold her political life. Sad,” he said.
An investigation by Navalny’s team found that Medvedev, while earning a government salary, had amassed a huge portfolio of extravagant real estate, allegedly given to him by oligarchs as bribes.
Navalnaya responded by saying that she did not need anyone to defend her from Medvedev, whom she called “a waste of space.”
“They deliberately give you this idiot so that you can let off steam on him,” Navalnaya posted on X, where in recent days she has amassed more than 300,000 followers. “Write that Putin killed Alexei. Write every day. For as long as you have the energy.”
Pro-Kremlin accounts on X posted a digitally altered 11-year-old image of Navalnaya designed to discredit her, part of the flurry of disinformation.
The original image showed her joyfully hugging her husband when he was released by a court in Kirov in 2013 after being convicted on trumped-up fraud charges. The altered image replaced Navalny’s smiling face with that of Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a London-based Russian tycoon who left the country in 2009.
Navalny’s mother, in video, pleads with Putin to release her son’s body
One of the sharpest blows against Navalny’s widow came from RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan.
“Look, when a wife comes out two hours after the news of her husband’s death wearing makeup, look, the girls will understand, her mascara didn’t even run. It’s so hard to manage,” Simonyan told state television host Vladimir Solovyov on Sunday, two days after Navalny died.
“And smiling at a news conference. Well, for me, it shows that she didn’t love her husband very much,” Simonyan added.
Solovyov, in his online program “Full Contact,” accused Navalny of creating a “totalitarian sect” that had threatened Russia and said that his widow, too, would wind up in prison in Russia if she ever returned to her home country.
“She has already said enough and done enough to be sent to prison,” he warned.
Meanwhile, in the latest bellicose Russian rhetoric, Medvedev said Thursday that Moscow could conquer Kyiv “if not now, at some other time,” because it was controlled by “international bandits” led by the United States.
“This regime must fall,” he said, reiterating Moscow’s determination to topple the Ukrainian government. “It must be destroyed. It must not remain in this world.”
Natalia Abbakumova and Mary Ilyushina in Riga contributed to this report.