(San Francisco) Joe Biden met Thursday with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaïa, the widow and daughter of the Russian opponent who died in prison Alexeï Navalny, in San Francisco, the White House announced in a press release.
During this interview, which was held away from the press, the American president “expressed his sincere condolences”.
Joe Biden, who had been campaigning in California since Tuesday, also told the two women of “his admiration for the extraordinary courage” of the Russian opponent as well as for “his fight against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia.” »
Dasha Navalnaïa is a student at Stanford University in California. In a message published Thursday on the social network X, accompanied by a photo showing them both, her mother indicated that she had joined her.
The 81-year-old democrat 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” , again according to the White House press release.
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 that the United States would unveil “major” new sanctions against Russia on Friday, in response to the opponent’s death, and to mark two years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
PHOTO EVGENY FELDMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Alexeï Navalny and Yulia Navalnaïa in 2013
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 said earlier on Thursday.
“The Russians must give him back his son,” insisted John Kirby, 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.