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Russian authorities have declared that the opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny died of pure causes however are refusing to launch his stays till his household agrees to a “secret funeral,” Mr. Navalny’s mom and his spokeswoman stated on Thursday.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s mom, stated she had been “secretly” taken to a morgue Wednesday night time, “the place they confirmed me Aleksei.” She was proven a medical report on Mr. Navalny’s dying that stated he died of pure causes, according to the Navalny workforce’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh.
However Ms. Navalnaya, 69, stated she now was locked in a grim battle with native authorities within the northern Russian metropolis of Salekhard who, taking orders from Moscow, weren’t releasing custody of the stays. She stated the authorities warned that if she didn’t “conform to a secret funeral,” then “they are going to do one thing with my son’s physique.”
“They’re blackmailing me,” Ms. Navalnaya stated in a video posted on her son’s YouTube channel. “They’re setting me situations on the place, when and the way Aleksei must be buried.”
The back-and-forth over Mr. Navalny’s stays displays how pivotal a determine he’s in Russian politics and around the globe — even in dying. Proving that, President Biden met with Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and his daughter, Daria, on Thursday in California, the place Daria, who goes by Dasha, is a scholar at Stanford.
The president expressed his admiration for Mr. Navalny’s “extraordinary braveness and his legacy of combating towards corruption and for a free and democratic Russia through which the rule of regulation applies equally to everybody,” in keeping with a White Home assertion. The president emphasised that Mr. Navalny’s “legacy will keep it up via individuals throughout Russia and around the globe mourning his loss and combating for freedom, democracy and human rights.”
After his assembly, Mr. Biden informed reporters in San Francisco that the US would announce sanctions on Friday towards President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Biden stated the Russian chief was chargeable for Mr. Navalny’s dying.
“We aren’t letting up,” Mr. Biden added.
The Kremlin seems to worry {that a} funeral drawing Mr. Navalny’s supporters might flip into a focus for protest. There was no instant remark from the Russian authorities on Lyudmila Navalnaya’s assertions.
“They need to take me to the sting of a cemetery to a contemporary grave and say, ‘Right here lies your son,’” Ms. Navalnaya stated in her video from Salekhard, the closest metropolis to the Arctic jail the place Mr. Navalny died final week. “I don’t agree with this. I need these of you who valued Aleksei and take his dying as a private tragedy to have the possibility to say farewell to him.”
Because the drama performed out, Mr. Putin stayed silent about Mr. Navalny and continued a publicity tour that appeared geared towards subsequent month’s presidential election — a rubber-stamp affair Mr. Putin is assured to win, however one the Kremlin is anticipated to make use of to exhibit Mr. Putin’s legitimacy.
On Thursday, Mr. Putin took a brief flight on a supersonic bomber, a stunt that doubled as a conspicuous reminder to the West of his nation’s standing as a nuclear superpower. Earlier this week, Mr. Putin denied American officers’ warnings that Russia could also be planning to put a nuclear weapon into orbit — however added that Russia’s new era of nuclear weapons meant for earthbound targets are what “they actually must be afraid of.”
Thursday’s flight took solely half-hour, the Kremlin stated in a press release, however the vary of the wide-wing Tu-160M, also called a White Swan in Russia, permits it to achieve the continental United States with two dozen nuclear weapons aboard.
Russian state tv confirmed Mr. Putin, 71, climbing up the steps below the enormous warplane, one of many largest and heaviest on this planet, earlier than it took off from the runway of an airfield in Kazan, a metropolis east of Moscow. The Kremlin launched a video of Mr. Putin’s flight that confirmed him sitting in a pilot’s seat.
Upon disembarking the airplane, Mr. Putin informed reporters that the flight left a great impression and praised the brand new modernized bomber as “very dependable.”
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, informed state tv that Mr. Putin made the choice to take the flight spontaneously on Thursday when he visited an aviation manufacturing facility in Kazan, the place he inspected 4 modernized Tu-160M bombers.
However since he grew to become Russian president greater than 20 years in the past, Mr. Putin has grow to be identified for publicity stunts designed to solid him as a robust chief of a fantastic energy. He has flown in a fighter jet, plunged into the ocean in a submersible and steered Siberian cranes to their winter habitat in a motorized grasp glider. In 2005, Mr. Putin took a flight in an older model of the Soviet-era bomber, the Tu-160.
Mr. Putin has stated nothing in public about Mr. Navalny’s dying final Friday, although Mr. Peskov stated the identical day that the president had been briefed.
Different Russian officers, nonetheless, have continued to assault Mr. Navalny’s motion after his dying. On Thursday, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the previous Russian president and now the deputy head of Mr. Putin’s Safety Council, skilled his ire on Yulia Navalnaya.
Yulia Navalnaya, who had lengthy shunned the highlight, stated after her husband’s dying that she would work to hold on his legacy.
“Have a look at the smiling, blissful face of Navalny’s widow,” Mr. Medvedev stated in an interview launched Thursday. “You get the sensation that she was ready for this occasion all these years in an effort to unfold her political life.”
Yulia Navalnaya dismissed Mr. Medvedev’s feedback on the social media platform X, calling him a “no one.”
However the greatest supply of tensions on Thursday centered what would occur to Mr. Navalny’s physique and his funeral.
Ivan Zhdanov, a prime aide to Mr. Navalny, stated that investigators had informed Mr. Navalny’s mom that her son’s physique wanted to be saved outdoors Moscow earlier than burial as a result of they had been afraid {that a} morgue within the Russian capital “could be stormed.”
In an interview posted to YouTube on Thursday, Mr. Zhdanov stated that investigators, below orders from Moscow, tried to restrict Mr. Navalny’s family members of their selection of cemetery and funeral corridor. Mr. Zhdanov in contrast the authorities’ calls for to the funeral of the mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who was laid to relaxation secretly in St. Petersburg after main a 24-hour mutiny towards the Kremlin and dying in a airplane crash two months later.
“It’s arduous to shock us,” Mr. Zhdanov stated. “However it was arduous to think about {that a} mom could be blackmailed with a rotting physique in an effort to deliver it to Moscow and bury it in secret.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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