Joe Biden met on Thursday in San Francisco (California) Ioulia and Dasha Navalnaïa, the widow and daughter of the Russian opponent who died in prison Alexeï Navalny, saluting “a man of incredible courage”.
“I had the honor of meeting the wife and daughter of Alexeï Navalny,” said the American president during a very brief intervention in front of the cameras after the interview, which was held at the away from the press. “He was a man of incredible courage and it’s extraordinary to see how his wife and daughter replicate that.”
US to unveil ‘major’ new sanctions against Russia
He once again accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being “responsible for the death” of his opponent. Dasha Navalnaïa is a student at Stanford University in California. In a message published Thursday on the social network X (formerly Twitter), accompanied by a photo showing them both, her mother indicated having joined her. The 81-year-old Democrat, campaigning in California since Tuesday, assured that Alexeï Navalny’s action “would continue through those who, in Russia and all over the world, mourn him and fight for freedom , democracy and human rights,” according to a statement released earlier Thursday by the White House.
The latter published two photos of the meeting. In one of them, Joe Biden hugs Yulia Navalnaïa. The other photo shows the American president surrounded by the two women, all three sitting in gray armchairs. Joe Biden repeated in his press release that the United States would unveil new “major” sanctions against Russia on Friday, in response to the death of the opponent, and to mark two years since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Navalny’s mother accused authorities of ‘blackmail’ against her
The mother of Alexeï Navalny, who died in detention on February 16, “must be able to recover the body of her son and pay him the appropriate tribute,” a White House spokesperson also declared on Thursday. “The Russians must give him back his son,” John Kirby insisted to the press, after the mother of the Russian opponent accused the authorities of “blackmailing” her to bury him secretly.
According to the Russian prison administration, the opponent died on February 16 in penal colony No. 3 in the locality of Kharp, a high-security prison where he had been detained since the end of 2023 and was serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism “. After miraculously surviving a poisoning in August 2020, then being treated in Germany, Alexei Navalny, who became popular thanks to his investigations into government corruption, chose to return to Russia in January 2021.
He was immediately arrested and successively sentenced to increasingly harsh sentences, in increasingly difficult conditions of detention, and was often locked up in the cold of an isolation cell.