Joe Biden on Thursday met with Navalny’s widow and daughter in California.

San Francisco:

President Joe Biden had a non-public, emotional assembly with the widow and daughter of Alexei Navalny in California on Thursday, as his administration introduced contemporary sanctions towards Russia over the demise of the Kremlin opposition chief.

The go to at a lodge in San Francisco got here because the White Home backed Navalny’s mom in her struggle to retrieve her son’s physique, which Russian authorities have refused to launch days after he died in an Arctic jail.

Navalny’s group says the 47-year-old, President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critic, was murdered.

Biden could possibly be seen hugging Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, and leaning ahead as he spoke together with her and daughter Dasha, a scholar at Stanford College, in pictures launched by the White Home.

At this time, I met with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya – Aleksey Navalny’s family members – to specific my condolences for his or her devastating loss.

Aleksey’s legacy of braveness will stay on in Yulia and Dasha, and the numerous individuals throughout Russia combating for democracy and human rights. pic.twitter.com/aiCcgTrws3

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 22, 2024

The president’s personal historical past of loss — his first spouse and his toddler daughter have been killed in a automobile crash in 1972, whereas his son Beau died of most cancers in 2015 — has seen him also known as America’s Consoler-in-Chief.

After the assembly, he stated the 2 girls have been emulating Navalny’s “unimaginable braveness.”

Yulia Navalnaya, who has vowed to proceed her late husband’s opposition to Putin, is “not giving up,” he stated. 

‘Polar Wolf’

The Biden administration introduced Thursday that it will sanction greater than 500 targets in Russia’s “warfare machine” to mark the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine and in response to Navalny’s demise, for which the president pressured Putin was “accountable.”

The US and its allies have imposed a slew of sanctions on Russia because it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Navalny, who died on February 16, galvanized mass protests towards Putin, successful recognition with a sequence of investigations into state corruption.

He was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent in 2020, then jailed in 2021 after returning to Russia following a interval of remedy in Germany.

He was sentenced to 19 years in jail on extremism expenses and despatched to IK-3, a harsh penal colony past the Arctic Circle often called “Polar Wolf.”

Western governments and Russian opposition figures have accused the Kremlin of being chargeable for his demise, with an outraged Biden beforehand blaming Putin and his “thugs.”

Mom’s plea

Tons of of individuals have been detained in Russia in current days at occasions to pay tribute to Navalny.

His mom, Lyudmila Navalnaya, travelled to Russia’s Far North the morning after her son’s demise was introduced, hoping to retrieve his physique. 

For days officers refused her entry, prompting her to make a video enchantment on to Putin himself. 

On Thursday she stated she had been proven Navalny’s physique in a morgue in Salekhard, the closest city to the distant jail. 

However, in a video launched on social media by Navalny’s group, she stated investigators needed her son to be buried “secretly, with no probability to say goodbye.

“They’re blackmailing me, they put circumstances for the place, when and the way Alexei ought to be buried. That is unlawful,” she stated.

“They wish to take me to the sting of a cemetery to a contemporary grave and say: Right here is the place your son lies. I’m towards that.

“I need that for these of you for whom Alexei is expensive, for everybody for whom his demise turned a private tragedy, to have the chance to say goodbye to him.”

She stated she recorded the video as a result of investigators have been “threatening” her.

“Wanting me within the eye, they stated that if I don’t conform to a secret funeral they will do one thing with my son’s physique… I ask for my son’s physique to be given to me instantly,” she stated.

Navalny’s mom additionally stated that investigators advised her they knew the reason for demise however didn’t say what it was.

The Kremlin has refused to say when the physique will probably be handed over and has branded Western accusations as “hysterical.”

“The Russians want to present her again her son,” US Nationwide Safety Council spokesman John Kirby advised reporters Thursday. 

Putin has remained silent on the demise of his primary political opponent.

Navalny’s spokesman Kira Yarmysh stated a medical report on the demise proven to Lyudmila Navalnaya “said that the reason for demise was pure.”

(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is revealed from a syndicated feed.)