Russian authorities have said opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny died of natural causes but are refusing to release his remains until his family agrees to a “secret funeral,” Mr. Navalny’s mother and spokeswoman said Thursday of.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Mr Navalny’s mother, said he had been taken “secretly” to a mortuary on Wednesday night, “where they showed me Aleksei”. She was given a medical report on Mr Navalny’s death which said he died of natural causes, according to the representative of the Navalny group, Kira Jarmis.
But Ms Navalnaya, 69, said she was now locked in a grim battle with local authorities in the northern Russian town of Salekhard, who, taking orders from Moscow, would not release custody of the remains. He said the authorities warned that if he did not “agree to a secret funeral” then “they will do something with my son’s body”.
“They are blackmailing me,” Ms Navalnaya said in a video posted on her son’s YouTube channel. “They set me conditions on where, when and how Alexei should be buried.”
The back-and-forth over Mr. Navalny’s remains reflects how pivotal a figure he is in Russian politics and around the world — even in death. Proving this, President Biden met with Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalny, and his daughter, Daria, on Thursday in California, where Daria, called Dasha, is a student at Stanford.
The president admired Mr. Navalny’s “extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to all,” according to a White House statement. The president stressed that “Mr. Navalny’s legacy will continue through people across Russia and around the world who mourn his loss and fight for freedom, democracy and human rights.”
After his meeting, Mr. Biden told reporters in San Francisco that the United States would announce sanctions on Friday against Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr Biden said the Russian leader was responsible for Mr Navalny’s death.
“We’re not giving up,” Mr. Biden added.
The Kremlin appears to fear that a funeral attended by Mr Navalny’s supporters could become the focus of protest. There was no immediate comment from Russian authorities on Lyudmila Navalnaya’s allegations.
“They want to take me to the edge of a cemetery to a new grave and say, ‘Here is your son,'” Ms. Navalnaya said in her video from Salekhard, the closest town to the Arctic prison where Mr. Navalny. week. “I don’t agree with that. I want those of you who valued Alexei and consider his death a personal tragedy to have the opportunity to say goodbye to him.”
As the drama unfolded, Mr. Putin remained silent on Mr. Navalny and went on a publicity tour that appeared geared toward next month’s presidential election — a case Mr. Putin is certain to win, but one he is expected to use the Kremlin to demonstrate Mr. Putin’s legitimacy.
On Thursday, Mr Putin flew a supersonic bomber briefly, a stunt that doubled as a visible reminder to the West of his country’s status as a nuclear superpower. Earlier this week, Mr Putin dismissed warnings from US officials that Russia may be planning to put a nuclear weapon into orbit – but added that Russia’s new generation of nuclear weapons aimed at Earth targets is what “really needs to scared”.
Thursday’s flight lasted only 30 minutes, the Kremlin said in a statement, but the range of the Tu-160M, also known as the White Swan in Russia, allows it to reach the continental United States with two dozen nuclear weapons.
Russian state television showed Mr Putin, 71, climbing the stairs under the giant warplane, one of the world’s largest and heaviest, before it took off from an airport runway in Kazan, a city east of Moscow. The Kremlin released a video of Mr Putin’s flight that showed him sitting in the pilot’s seat.
As the plane disembarked, Mr Putin told reporters the flight had left a good impression and praised the new modernized bomber as “very reliable”.
Dmitry S. Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, told state television that Mr. Putin made the decision to make the flight spontaneously on Thursday when he visited an aviation factory in Kazan, where he inspected four modernized Tu-160M bombers.
But since becoming Russia’s president more than two decades ago, Mr. Putin has become known for publicity stunts designed to portray him as a powerful leader of a major power. He has flown in a fighter jet, dropped into the sea in a submersible and guided Siberian cranes to their winter habitat in a motorized hang glider. In 2005, Mr Putin flew an older version of the Soviet-era Tu-160 bomber.
Mr Putin said nothing publicly about Mr Navalny’s death last Friday, although Mr Peskov did on the same day the president was informed.
Other Russian officials, however, continued to attack Mr. Navalny’s movement after his death. On Thursday, Dmitry A. Medvedev, Russia’s former president and now deputy head of Mr. Putin’s Security Council, directed his anger at Yulia Navalnaya.
Yulia Navalnaya, who had long shied away from the limelight, said after her husband’s death that she would work to continue his legacy.
“Look at the smiling, happy face of Navalny’s widow,” Mr Medvedev said in an interview on Thursday. “You get the feeling that she has been waiting for this event all these years to unfold her political life.”
Yulia Navalnaya he was fired Mr Medvedev’s comments on social networking platform X, calling him a “nobody”.
But the biggest source of tension on Thursday centered on what would happen to Mr Navalny’s body and his funeral.
Ivan Zhdanov, a top aide to Mr. Navalny, said investigators told Mr. Navalny’s mother that her son’s body should be stored outside Moscow before burial because they feared a morgue in the Russian capital “would there was a storm.”
In an interview posted on YouTube on Thursday, Mr. Zhdanov said that investigators, at the behest of Moscow, tried to limit Mr. Navalny’s relatives in their choice of cemetery and funeral hall. Mr. Zhdanov compared the authorities’ demands to the funeral of mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who was secretly buried in St. Petersburg after leading a 24-hour uprising against the Kremlin and died in a plane crash two months later.
“It’s hard to surprise us,” Mr. Zhdanov said. “But it was hard to imagine that a mother would blackmail a rotting body to bring it to Moscow and secretly bury it.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed to the report.