Russian authorities have issued an ultimatum to Aleksei A. Navalny’s mother, demanding a secret funeral for the late opposition campaigner, or else he will be buried by the state on prison grounds. Lyudmila Navalnaya, Mr. Navalny’s mother, refused to negotiate, arguing that Russian authorities had no legal right to decide the time and place of her son’s burial. She is demanding compliance with the law, which requires investigators to hand over the body within two days of the cause of death being established. The ultimatum was the latest twist in a macabre saga, in which Mr. Navalny’s 69-year-old mother has been trying to retrieve her son’s body for nearly a week at an Arctic morgue in Russia, near the prison where he died. The struggle over his body suggested the opposite, as Russian authorities showed intense sensitivity to the possibility of a public funeral amid an overall crackdown on dissent. Russian authorities have detained or arrested hundreds of Mr. Navalny’s supporters in recent days, in some cases simply for laying flowers at memorials to mark his passing. The United States announced a new round of sanctions against Moscow that designated three Russian penal officials overseeing the prison above the Arctic Circle where Mr. Navalny was being held. President Biden met Mr. Navalny’s widow and daughter in California and praised the Kremlin critic’s “legacy of courage.” After the announcement of Mr. Navalny’s death on Feb. 16, his mother had to wait five days before Russian authorities showed her the body. On Thursday, she was shown a medical report that claimed he died of natural causes. At that point, Ms. Navalnaya accused the authorities of “blackmailing” her and said they were refusing to release her son’s remains until she agreed to a secret funeral without a public goodbye. In response, she filed a complaint with Russian authorities against the investigator handling the case, asking that he be charged under Article 244 of the Russian criminal code, which prohibits the desecration of a dead body, Mr. Navalny’s anti-corruption organization said Friday. Russian authorities handling the post-mortem investigation of Mr. Navalny’s body are part of the same security apparatus that,…
2024-02-23 22:32:20
Original from www.nytimes.com