The Biden administration imposes 500 new sanctions on Russian individuals and companies on the anniversary of the war in Ukraine.
First, Joe Biden let the symbolism do the talking. Seven days after Alexei Navalny's death, the US President met with Julia Navalnaya and her daughter Darja, who studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, San Francisco. He expressed his condolences to both and thus recognized the work of the Russian Kremlin critic.
On Friday, just in time for the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration announced the toughest sanctions against Russia to date. The punitive measures affect more than 500 people and companies. These include three officials linked to Navalny's death at the Siberian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.
The sanctions target Russia's financial sector and military-industrial complex, banks, transport, logistics and steel companies. The US government has also targeted companies in China, Turkey, India, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates that help Russia evade sanctions. The measures would ensure “that Putin pays an even higher price for his aggression abroad and his repression at home,” Biden said. Putin miscalculated.
Mother under pressure
In Russia, however, authorities continued to pressure Lyudmila Navalnaya. They gave Alexei Navalny's mother an ultimatum: either she agreed to her son's funeral without public participation within three hours, or he would be buried in a prison camp. Only on Thursday was she allowed to see the body of her son, the Russian opposition politician who died in an Arctic prison camp.
For days she drove from place to place in icy northwestern Siberia, from the penal colony to the clinic closest to the morgue. Lyudmila Navalnaya initially did not find her son.
On Thursday night, things apparently happened very quickly: “They secretly took me to the morgue, where they showed me Alexei,” she said later in a minute-and-a-half video message. This was in the next larger town of Salekhard, about an hour's drive east of the prison camp, where there is also an airport. She said she spent 24 hours alone with investigators and detectives.
Bizarre spectacle
Yet the regime continues to play out the bizarre and vile drama surrounding the body of Navalny, who survived a poison attack by Russian intelligence three years ago and whose name Vladimir Putin never mentions. “I signed the death certificate saying that Alexei died of natural causes. According to the law, they should have handed over the body to me immediately. But they haven't done it yet.” Instead, she was threatened, said Lyudmila Navalnaya: “Time is against you,” an investigator told her, and the body was already decomposing.
She is being blackmailed: “They want to take me to the edge of a cemetery, close to a recent grave, and tell me: 'Your son rests here.' I don’t agree with that,” she says in the video.
According to the Russian Orthodox faith – and Navalny was a deeply religious person – it is customary to bury the dead after three days. But authorities rejected the family's requests. They also do not listen to the pleas for help from Russian opposition activists and artists. “Traditional values? “You, Putin, are destroying these traditional values that you praise so much,” says singer Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was once known for the band “Pussy Riot”.