from the white house
A photo released by the White House on Thursday shows President Joe Biden meeting with Alexei Navalny's wife and daughters Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya in San Francisco, California.
CNN
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President Joe Biden met with the wife and daughter of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Thursday, the White House said, as the president prepares for additional sanctions against Russia.
After the meeting, Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin himself would be subject to sanctions.
“It was an honor to meet his wife and daughter, and obviously he was an incredibly courageous man,” Biden told reporters about Navalny. “Tomorrow we will announce sanctions against President Putin responsible for his death.”
Biden said it was clear from the meeting that Navalny's wife “keeps fighting.”
“We're not giving up,” he said.
of meeting The incident occurred in California, where Biden is visiting to raise money. Mr. Navalny's daughter, Dasha Navalnaya, is a student at Stanford University.
The White House said in a statement that Biden expressed his “admiration for Alexei Navalny's extraordinary courage and work in the fight against corruption, and for a free and democratic Russia where the rule of law applies equally to all.” I expressed my intention.”
“Alexei's legacy will live on through the people of Russia and around the world who mourn his death and fight for freedom, democracy, and human rights,” Biden said.
The meeting between Yulia Navalny and Dasha Navalnaya took place a day before new U.S. sanctions against Russia are expected to be imposed over Navalny's death.
“In response to Alexei's death, Russia's repression and aggression, and its brutal and illegal war in Ukraine, Biden confirmed that tomorrow his administration will announce major new sanctions against Russia. ” he said.
The Biden administration plans to impose new sanctions on more than 500 targets on Friday in response to Navalny's death and on the eve of Russia's two-year war in Ukraine, a Treasury official said.
A senior U.S. official said U.S. officials had been working on new sanctions against Russia ahead of the opposition leader's death, which were added in response to his death. Reuters first reported the number of sanctions.
Navalny's death was announced by Russian prison authorities last Friday, spurring international outrage against President Vladimir Putin. Navalny is the latest in a string of Putin critics to die under mysterious circumstances.
Immediately after news of Navalny's death broke, Biden laid the blame squarely at Putin's feet.
“The fact of the matter is, President Putin is responsible, whether he ordered it or whether he was responsible for the situation that he put that person in,” Biden told reporters on Monday. Told. “And he is — it's a reflection of who he is. And that can never be tolerated.”
Biden also harshly criticized former President Donald Trump, his likely rival in 2024, for his handling of Navalny's death. Trump, commenting publicly for the first time on Navalny's death, posted a message on social media comparing his own legal problems to those faced by Navalny. Trump did not mention Putin in his message, but recently said he would encourage Russia to get its way with NATO members who do not meet their funding obligations.
“He compared himself to Navalny and said he was persecuted in the same way that Navalny was persecuted because our country became a communist country,” Biden said at a fundraiser Wednesday after Trump's remarks. They say it happened,” he said. “Where the hell did this come from?”
At the same fundraiser, Biden called Putin a “crazy SOB.” In response, the Kremlin said Biden's comments were a “huge embarrassment” for the United States.
Navalny is Russia's most high-profile opposition leader and has criticized President Putin for years at personal risk.
In 2020, Navanry was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. He spent several months in Germany recovering from his addiction and returned to Russia in 2021. He was arrested upon arrival in Russia.
Navalny was serving a 19-year sentence after being convicted in August of founding an extremist community, financing extremist activists and various other crimes. He is already serving an 11-and-a-half year sentence in a maximum-security facility for fraud and other reform charges, which he denies.
He spent his last weeks in the IK-3 penal colony in Harp, known as the “Arctic Wolves”, and described the “frigid” conditions there before his death.
Russian prison authorities reported that Navalny “felt sick after a walk” and lost consciousness “almost immediately” in the Siberian penal colony.
Mr Navalny's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said on Wednesday that she had seen her son's body at a morgue in Siberia.
Navalny's press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, told X that medical reports showed the 47-year-old's death was due to natural causes.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Sam Fossum and Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.
