The President of the United States, Joe Biden, presented his condolences on Thursday February 22 to the widow and daughter of Alexeï Navalny during a meeting in San Francisco, California. Mr. Biden, on the electoral campaign in this state since Tuesday, spoke away from the press with Yulia and Dacha Navalnaïa, who studies at Stanford University.

“He was a man of incredible courage and it is extraordinary to see his wife and daughter take up the torch,” declared the Democratic president, during a very brief intervention in front of the cameras, after the meeting, which took place a few hours before the American government announced new sanctions against five hundred entities linked to Moscow, “its supporters and its war machine”.

These sanctions, which will be detailed on Friday, represent “the largest tranche since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by [Vladimir] Putin”, on February 24, 2022, explained a spokesperson for the Treasury Department, interviewed by Agence France-Presse.

” Blackmail “

Mr. Biden once again accused his Russian counterpart of being “responsible for the death” of Mr. Navalny, which occurred after three grueling years of imprisonment.

Washington at the same time ordered the Russian authorities to “return” the body of the opponent to his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaïa, who is in Russia. “Legally, they should have returned Alexei’s body to me immediately. Instead, they are blackmailing me,” she said. On Thursday, she was finally able to see her son’s body, ensuring that investigators had already established the cause of death, which they declared “natural”, according to the opponent’s team.

“They started threatening me. Looking me in the eye, they say that if I refuse a secret funeral, they will do something with his body. The investigator (…) told me openly: ‘Time is against you, the corpse is decomposing’,” she continued.

For Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya, the authorities want to prevent the funeral from giving rise to demonstrations. “They will return the body, but on condition that the funeral does not become a political event,” she wrote on her Telegram account.

Alexeï Navalny’s team accuses the Kremlin of having him killed and of seeking to conceal its responsibility.

“Hysteria”

Like the Americans, Europeans believe that Mr. Putin and his government are responsible for Mr. Navalny’s death; “gross and unfounded” accusations, according to Moscow. The Russian president has not made any public comments on the matter.

The West “acts as if it were prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time. The hysteria over Navalny’s death proves it,” commented the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, on Thursday. “These people have no right to interfere in our internal affairs,” he added, on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Brazil.

According to the Biden administration, the “major” sanctions that will be detailed on Friday are a response to Mr. Navalny’s death, but also coincide with the second anniversary of the large-scale Russian offensive. Many experts believe that the world’s leading power and its allies no longer have a myriad of options to put pressure on Russia; which has implemented various circumvention systems and obtains weapons from Iran and North Korea.

The American Department of Justice announced on Thursday the indictment of several Russian oligarchs, while the United Kingdom took retaliatory measures against around fifty individuals and legal entities. The member states of the European Union, for their part, agreed on Wednesday on a thirteenth set of sanctions.