President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he visited privately in California with the widow and daughter of Kremlin opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison last week.
After visiting with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya in San Francisco, Biden told reporters that President Vladimir Putin’s late opponent was “a man of incredible courage.”
He stated that Yulia Navalnaya and her daughter, who attends Stanford University in California, “are emulating that.”
The widow is “going to continue the fight,” he said. “She’s not giving up.”
Biden also repeated his intention to announce sanctions on Friday, saying they will be “against Putin, who is responsible for his death.”
A White House statement earlier stated that the US president used his closed-door discussion to express “admiration for Alexei Navalny’s extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia.”
Vice-President Biden “emphasised that Alexei’s legacy will carry on through people across Russia and around the world mourning his loss and fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights.”
Russian officials confirmed on February 16 that Navalny, 47, died unexpectedly in jail.
Navalny, one of Putin’s last remaining opponents in Russia, sparked enormous protests and rose to prominence through a series of probes exposing official corruption.
He almost escaped poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve toxin in 2020 and was imprisoned in 2021 after returning to Russia from treatment in Germany. He was condemned to 19 years in jail on extremism charges and sent to IK-3, a severe penal colony located outside the Arctic Circle nicknamed as “Polar Wolf.”
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Navalny’s mother, claimed Thursday that authorities were attempting to force her to carry out his burial in secret.
According to US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, Russian authorities should restore the campaigner’s body to his mother to “properly memorialize… her son’s bravery, courage, and service.”
Earlier, the US administration honoured the nearing two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of pro-Western Ukraine by unsealing charges against a number of wealthy Russians in an effort to stem the “flow of illegal funds that are fueling” Moscow’s war.