Joe Biden met with Thursday à San Francisco (California) Yulia and Dasha Navalnaïa, the widow and daughter of the Russian opponent who died in prison Alexeï Navalny, saluting "a man of incredible courage". “I had the honor of meeting the wife and daughter of Alexeï Navalny”, said the American president during a very brief intervention in front of the cameras after the interview, which kept away from the press. “He was a man of incredible courage and it's extraordinary to see how his wife and daughter replicate that.” He once again accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being “responsible for the death” of his opponent. Dasha Navalnaïa is a student at Stanford University, in California. In a message published Thursday on the social network X (formerly Twitter), accompanied by a photo showing them both, her mother indicated having joined her. The 81-year-old Democrat, campaigning in California since Tuesday, assured that Alexeï Navalny's action “would continue through those who, in Russia and around the world are mourning and fighting for freedom, democracy and human rights,” according to a White House statement released earlier Thursday. The latter published two photos of the meeting. In one of them, Joe Biden hugs Yulia Navalnaïa. Photo released by the White House, on February 22, 2024, of American President Joe Biden hugging Yulia Navalnaïa, the widow of Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny, who died in prison, during a meeting in San Francisco, California © WHITE HOUSE – HANDOUT The other photo shows the American president surrounded by the two women, all three seated in gray armchairs. Joe Biden repeated in his press release that the United States would unveil on Friday new “major” sanctions against Russia, in response to the death of the opponent, and to mark the two years that have passed since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. < p>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 also declared on Thursday . “The Russians must give him back his son”, John Kirby insisted to the press, after the mother of the Russian opponent accused the authorities of exercising a “blackmail” against her to bury her 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, Alexeï Navalny, who became popular thanks to his investigations into power corruption, had chose to return to Russia in January 2021. He was immediately arrested and sentenced successively to increasingly harsh sentences, in increasingly harsh conditions of detention. difficult, and was often locked in the cold of an isolation cell. All rights of reproduction and representation reserved. © (2024) Agence France-Presse
By Teilor Stone
Teilor Stone has been a reporter on the news desk since 2013. Before that she wrote about young adolescence and family dynamics for Styles and was the legal affairs correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining Thesaxon , Teilor Stone worked as a staff writer at the Village Voice and a freelancer for Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, GQ and Mirabella. To get in touch, contact me through my teilor@nizhtimes.com 1-800-268-7116