Joe Biden met with Alexei Navalny’s widow and daughter

President of the United States, Joe Bidenmet privately in California on Thursday with the widow and daughter of Russian adversary Alexei Navalny, who recently died in prison in the Arctic, the White House reported.

At a meeting in downtown San Francisco, Biden expressed his “heartfelt condolences for such a terrible loss” to Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya, the White House said in a statement. Reaffirmed announcement of sanctions against Russia.

In their meeting, “the President expressed his admiration for Alexei Navalny’s extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting corruption and for a free and democratic Russia,” the statement said.

Biden “stressed that Alexey’s legacy will continue through people across Russia and around the world who mourn his loss and fight for freedom, democracy and human rights.”

Russian authorities reported on February 16 that Navalny, Off 47 years, He died suddenly in custody.

Navalny, one of the last opponents of President Vladimir Putin still active in Russia, has sparked mass protests and gained popularity with a series of investigations into state corruption.

He was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent in 2020 and imprisoned in 2021 after returning to Russia after a period of treatment in Germany. was 19 years imprisonment Sent to IK-3 on charges of extremism and a harsh penal colony outside the Arctic Circle known as the “Polar Wolf”.

Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, revealed this Thursday that authorities are trying to force her to have a secret burial.

A spokesman for the National Security Council of the United States, John Kirbytold reporters that Russian authorities should return the activist’s body to his mother so she can “properly remember her son’s bravery and courage and service.”

Earlier, the US government marked the upcoming second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of pro-Western Ukraine by bringing charges against a series of wealthy Russians for helping to stem the “flow of illicit funds” to Moscow’s war. Sanctions aimed specifically at responding to Navalny’s death should be announced this Friday.

Putin and Biden last met in Geneva (Switzerland) in June 2021, and contacts between the two countries have dwindled since the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The US, along with the European Union, has led a strategy of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine.

(With information from AFP and EFE)