Joe Biden met Thursday with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya, the widow and daughter of the Russian opposition figure who died in prison, Alexei Navalny, in San Francisco (California), the White House announced in a press release.
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During this interview, which took place away from the press, the US President expressed his “sincere condolences.”
Joe Biden, who has been campaigning in California since Tuesday, also expressed to the two women his “admiration for the extraordinary courage” of the Russian opponent as well as his “fight against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia.”
Dasha Navalnaya is a student at Stanford University in California. In a message she posted Thursday on the social networking site X (formerly Twitter), accompanied by a photo showing them, her mother indicated that she was joining her.
The 81-year-old Democrat stressed that Alexei Navalny's actions “will live on through those in Russia and around the world who mourned him and fought for freedom, democracy and human rights,” according to the White House press release.
The latter published two photos from the meeting. In one of them, Joe Biden hugs Yulia Navalnaya.
The other photo shows the US President surrounded by the two women, each sitting on two gray chairs.
Joe Biden reiterated that the United States will unveil “significant” new sanctions against Russia on Friday, in response to the killing of its rival, and to mark two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A White House spokesman said earlier Thursday that the mother of Alexei Navalny, who died in custody on February 16, “should be able to recover her son's body and pay him the appropriate tribute.”
John Kirby insisted that “the Russians must return his son to him,” after the Russian opposition’s mother accused the authorities of “blackmailing” her into burying him secretly.
According to the Russian Prisons Administration, the dissident died on February 16 in Penal Prison No. 3 in Kharib locality, a high-security prison where he had been detained since the end of 2023, and was serving a 19-year prison sentence for “murder.” “Extremism.”
After narrowly escaping poisoning in August 2020 and then being treated in Germany, Alexei Navalny, who had become hugely 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 detention conditions, and was often kept in a cold solitary cell.
