Russian authorities have said that opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died of natural causes but are refusing to release his remains until his family agrees to a “secret burial,” Mr. Navalny's mother and his spokeswoman said on Thursday.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny's mother, said she was “secretly” taken to a morgue on Wednesday evening “where they showed me Aleksei.” She was presented with a medical report on Mr Navalny's death, saying he died of natural causes. after to Navalny team spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh.
But Ms. Navalnaya, 69, said she was now embroiled in a bitter battle with local authorities in the northern Russian city of Salekhard, who did not release custody of the remains on Moscow's orders. She said authorities warned that if she “did not agree to a secret burial” “something would happen to my son's body.”
“They are blackmailing me,” Ms. Navalnaya said in a video posted on her son’s YouTube channel. “They give me conditions as to where, when and how Aleksei should be buried.”
The back and forth over Mr Navalny's remains reflects how central a figure he is in Russian politics and around the world – even after his death. As evidence of this, President Biden met with Mr. Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, and his daughter Daria on Thursday in California, where Daria, who goes by Dasha, is a student at Stanford.
According to a White House statement, the president expressed his admiration for Mr. Navalny's “extraordinary courage and legacy in the fight against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to all.” The president stressed that Mr. Navalny's legacy will endure “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 against Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday. Mr Biden said the Russian leader was responsible for Mr Navalny's death.
“We are not letting up,” Mr. Biden added.
The Kremlin apparently fears that a funeral of Navalny's supporters could become a focal point of the protest. There was no immediate comment from Russian authorities on Lyudmila Navalnaya's claims.
“They want to take me to the edge of a cemetery to a new grave and say, 'Here lies your son,'” Ms. Navalnaya said in her video from Salekhard, the city closest to the Arctic prison where Mr. Navalny was last held died week. “I don't agree with that. I want those of you who valued Aleksei and see his death as a personal tragedy to have the chance to say goodbye to him.”
As the drama unfolded, President Vladimir V. Putin remained silent about Mr. Navalny and continued his publicity tour that appeared to be aimed at next month's presidential election – an affair that Putin is certain to win but that the Kremlin expects to win is to demonstrate Mr. Putin's legitimacy.
On Thursday, Mr. Putin took a short flight in a supersonic bomber, a stunt that simultaneously served as a stark reminder to the West of his country's status as a nuclear superpower. Earlier this week, Mr. Putin denied warnings from American officials that Russia may be planning to put a nuclear weapon into orbit – but added that Russia's new generation of nuclear weapons, intended for Earth-based targets, is what they are really facing should be afraid.”
Thursday's flight lasted only 30 minutes, the Kremlin said in a statement, but the range of the large-wing Tu-160M, also known in Russia as the “White Swan,” allowed it to reach the American mainland with two dozen nuclear weapons on board to reach.
Russian state television showed Putin, 71, climbing the stairs beneath the giant fighter jet, one of the largest and heaviest in the world, before it took off from the runway of an airfield in Kazan, a city east of Moscow. The Kremlin released a video of Putin's flight showing him sitting in a pilot's seat.
Disembarking from the plane, Mr. Putin told reporters that the flight left a good impression and praised the new modernized bomber as “very reliable.”
Dmitry S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told state television that Putin made the decision to fly spontaneously on Thursday while visiting an aviation factory in Kazan where he inspected four modernized Tu-160M bombers.
But since becoming Russian president more than two decades ago, Mr Putin has become known for his publicity stunts aimed at portraying him as a strong leader of a major power. He flew in a fighter jet, plunged into the sea in a submersible and guided Siberian cranes to their winter quarters in a motorized hang glider. In 2005, Mr. Putin flew an older version of the Soviet-era bomber, the Tu-160.
Mr. Putin said nothing publicly about Mr. Navalny's death last Friday, although Mr. Peskov said the same day that the president had been informed about it.
However, other Russian officials have continued to attack Mr. Navalny's movement after his death. On Thursday, Dmitry A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and current deputy chairman of Putin's Security Council, directed his ire at Yulia Navalnaya.
Yulia Navalnaya, who had long avoided the spotlight, said after her husband's death that she would work to carry on his legacy.
“Look at the smiling, happy face of Navalny’s widow,” Mr Medvedev said in an interview published on Thursday. “You get the feeling that she has been waiting all these years for this event to unfold her political life.”
Yulia Navalnaya dismissed Comments from Mr Medvedev on the social media platform X in which he refers to him as 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 adviser to Mr. Navalny, said investigators had told Mr. Navalny's mother that her son's body needed to be stored outside Moscow before burial because they feared a morgue would be opened in the Russian capital. “stormed”.
In an interview posted on YouTube on Thursday, Mr. Zhdanov said that investigators, on Moscow's orders, had tried to limit the choice of cemetery and funeral home for Mr. Navalny's relatives. Mr. Zhdanov compared the authorities' demands to the funeral of mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who was secretly buried in St. Petersburg after leading a 24-hour mutiny 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 with a rotting body would be blackmailed into taking it to Moscow and burying it in secret.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.