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Alexei Navalny's relatives are still waiting to bury his body.
The Kremlin critic's mother makes allegations.
San Francisco - US President Joe Biden met with Alexei Navalny's widow and daughter, Julia and Daria Navalnaya, in San Francisco on Thursday.
Biden expressed condolences after the Russian opposition leader's team said the official death certificate showed Navalny's death in prison as "natural causes."
His family and team claim he was murdered and that authorities refused to release his body to cover up evidence.
Biden has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is "responsible for Navalny's death," and he has told Yulia and Daria Navalnaya that he will announce sweeping new sanctions on Friday to hold Russia accountable.
The White House released a photo of the president hugging Navalny's widow.
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Alexei Navalny's mother is being "blackmailed" by Russian authorities
Previously, Navalny's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, claimed on Thursday that Russian authorities tried to blackmail her into a secret funeral for her son "after finally allowing her to see his body for the first time since his sudden death in prison last Friday .
In a statement from the White House, Biden expressed his admiration for Navalny's "extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to all."
Navalny's legacy, Biden said, will live on through people across Russia and around the world who mourn his loss and fight for freedom, democracy and human rights.
Russia refuses to hand over Navalny's body
Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, whose son was Putin's fiercest rival, said in a video posted on YouTube that the investigative committee in the northern Russian city of Salekhard, near the prison where Navalny died, was still refusing to give her the body to hand her over and force her to attend a secret funeral.
According to Navalnaya's account, an official from Salekhard's investigative committee tried hard to force her consent, warning her that her son's body would rot if she did not agree to the committee's terms.
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Authorities issued her a death certificate stating that Navalny died of “natural causes,” said Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysch.
Joe Biden hugs Yulia Borisovna Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny.
© White House/Imago
The authorities' efforts to prevent a public funeral shows one thing above all: the Kremlin fears that the funeral could become a flashpoint for Navalny's supporters.
Hundreds of them have risked arrest in cities across Russia to offer their condolences by laying flowers at makeshift memorials.
Navalny's wife faces prison if she returns to Russia
Ivan Zhdanov, a senior adviser to Navalny, reported extraordinary arguments over the funeral involving the powerful head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin.
Bastrykin was a key figure behind Navalny's years of legal harassment, including as the driving force behind a series of criminal cases that international rights groups condemned as political persecution.
Meanwhile, propagandists on Russian state television warned on Thursday that Yulia Navalnaya would face arrest if she returned to Russia.
Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to continue her husband's crusade for democracy in Russia, and in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, she bluntly accused the authoritarian Russian leader of killing him.
“Putin killed Alexei,” she wrote.
Putin is confident he will win another term in office in Russia's election next month.
The Russian president showed off the election campaign on Thursday by flying in 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.”
Kremlin spokesman Peskov comments on Navalny's death
Navalny's mother said on Thursday that she was finally allowed to see the body last night, but was taken away secretly and separately by her lawyers.
“Last night I was secretly taken to the morgue, where I was shown Alexei,” Lyudmila Navalnaya said, adding that she signed the death certificate required for the body to be returned.
“According to the law, they were supposed to hand over Alexei’s body to me immediately, but they have not done so to this day,” she said in the video message addressed to her son’s supporters.
“Instead, they blackmail me and set conditions as to where, when and how Alexei should be buried.
This is illegal.”
In front of the Russian embassy in Berlin, people laid flowers, pictures and letters for Alexei Navalny (symbolic image).
© Christoph Worsch/Imago
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov twice skipped his usual daily conference call with reporters as the battle for the body continued.
On Thursday, several Russian celebrities and historians sent messages to Putin demanding that Navalny's body be returned to his family.
According to Zhdanov, Investigative Committee officials offered a plane to fly Navalny's body to Moscow - but only if family members kept quiet about it to prevent crowds of supporters from flocking to the airport.
Russia wants to prevent serious scenes at Navalny's funeral
Russian authorities appear eager to avoid serious scenes at Navalny's funeral.
This happened in 1989 at the funeral of the well-known Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.
Tens of thousands of Russians took part in an outdoor church service at the time.
A funeral procession then moved slowly through the streets of Moscow for hours, followed by a huge crowd of supporters on foot.
In contrast to Sakharov's funeral in the era of Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, hundreds of Navalny's supporters were arrested simply for laying flowers at makeshift memorials to pay their respects.
Some also received military summonses.
In her statement addressed to her son's supporters, Lyudmila Navalnaya reported hours of negotiations with officials who, without a lawyer, tried to set the conditions for a private funeral in the presence of the family.
“They want it to be done in secret, without saying goodbye.
They want to take me to the edge of the cemetery to a fresh grave and say: 'Your son rests here'.
I don’t agree with that,” she says.
“I want you, who care about Alexei, for whom his death was a personal tragedy, to have the opportunity to say goodbye to him.
I’m recording this video because they started threatening me.”
“They look me in the eye and say they will do something with my son’s body if I don’t agree to a secret burial,” she continued.
“I don’t want any special conditions,” Navalnaya said.
“I just want everything to be done according to the law.
I demand that you hand over my son’s body to me immediately.”
Kremlin spreads fake news about Yulia Navalnaya
In a sign of concern among Putin's supporters - and perhaps in the Kremlin too - Yulia Navalnaya has become the target of a flood of disinformation.
Claims are circulating on social media that she couldn't suppress a smile when she appeared at the Munich Security Conference shortly after receiving news of her son's death.
Since then, in further false posts by people close to the Kremlin on Telegram and X, she has been accused of “betraying” him or having an affair.
The first Russian attacks on Navalnaya followed her dramatic video announcement on Monday that she wanted to continue her husband's work in resistance to Putin's regime, as well as her accusation that the Russian leader had him poisoned.
Western governments have pledged to impose further sanctions to punish Russia over Navalnya's death.
On Wednesday, Britain imposed largely symbolic sanctions on officials at the Arctic Wolf prison.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, told Russian journalists on Thursday that he had "nothing good" to say about Navalny before slandering Navalnaya.
“Look at the smiling, happy face of Navalny’s widow,” Medvedev said.
“It seems like she has been waiting all these years for this event to unfold her political life.
Sad,” he said.
Navalny's team uncovered salaries of Kremlin politicians
An investigation by Navalny's team found that while Medvedev was drawing a government salary, he had amassed a huge portfolio of extravagant properties that were allegedly given to him as bribes by oligarchs.
Navalnaya then said she didn't need anyone to defend her from Medvedev, whom she called a "waste of space."
“They deliberately give you this idiot so you can have fun with him,” Navalnaya posted on X, where she has amassed more than 300,000 followers in recent days.
“Write that Putin killed Alexei.
Write every day.
As long as you have the energy.”
Pro-Kremlin accounts on
The original picture showed her joyfully hugging her husband as he was released by a Kirov court in 2013 after being convicted of 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.
One of the sharpest blows against Navalny's widow came from RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
“If a wife goes out on the street with makeup two hours after the news of her husband's death, the girls will understand that her mascara didn't even run.
It's so hard to deal with it," Simonyan told state television host Vladimir Solovyov on Sunday, two days after Navalny's death.
“And the smile at a press conference.
Well, to me it shows that she didn’t love her husband very much,” Simonyan added.
Putin's propagandist blames Alexei Navalny
Speaking on his online show “Full Contact,” Solovyov accused Navalny of founding a “totalitarian sect” that threatened Russia and said his widow would also end up in prison in Russia if she ever returned to her homeland.
“She has already said and done enough to be sent to prison,” he warned.
In Russia's latest bellicose rhetoric, Medvedev said Thursday that Moscow could seize Kiev "if not now, then at another time" because it is 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 has to be destroyed.
It can’t stay in this world.”
Natalia Abbakumova and Mary Ilyushina in Riga contributed to this report.
About the author
Robyn Dixon
is a foreign correspondent on her third visit to Russia after reporting there for nearly a decade since the early 1990s.
She has been the Washington Post's Moscow bureau chief since November 2019.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 23, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.