Family seeks Navalny’s body, Kyiv for stalled aid

The family of Russia’s opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny has demanded the handover of his body by the Kremlin as Ukraine’s leader continue to look to the United States’ promised military aid a day after losing a city to enemy forces.

The 47-year-old Kremlin critic died in an Arctic prison on Friday after spending more than three years behind bars.

On Saturday, Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila, and his lawyer were refused access to his body after arriving at the remote Siberian prison colony where he had been held, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said.

“It’s obvious that the killers want to cover their tracks and are therefore not handing over Alexei’s body, hiding it even from his mother,” Navalny’s team said in a post on Telegram.

“They don’t want whatever method they used to kill Alexei to come out,” Yarmysh said in an online broadcast, in his backers’ strongest accusation yet of foul play.

Across Russia, police on Saturday moved swiftly to break up small protests in honor of Navalny, arresting more than 400 people in 36 cities, the OVD-Info rights group said.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden on Saturday told Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky that he is “confident” the US Congress will renew war aid for Kyiv.

“I spoke with Zelensky this afternoon to let him know that I was confident we’re going to get that money,” Biden told reporters after attending church in Delaware.

Failure by US lawmakers to approve new funding for military aid to Kyiv would be “absurd” and “unethical,” he said, adding: “I’m going to fight to get them the ammunition they need.”

In a post on Telegram following the phone call, Zelensky said: “I am glad that I can count on the full support of the American president. We also believe in the wise decision of the US Congress.”

Former US President Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee in the November US presidential election, opposes helping Kyiv and recently used his sway to kill a US border reform bill that would have also authorized additional aid to Ukraine.

The leaders spoke hours after Russia captured the eastern Ukrainian stronghold of Avdiivka, a major symbolic victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Avdiivka, now mostly destroyed, had been a symbol of Ukraine’s determined resistance to Russian aggression since 2014.

The White House said in a statement the Ukrainian withdrawal from the town came “after Ukrainian soldiers had to ration ammunition due to dwindling supplies as a result of congressional inaction, resulting in Russia’s first notable gains in months.”

In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, Russian rocket fire killed at least two people on Saturday night, the regional governor said.

“Rescuers pulled the body of a woman born in 1977 from the rubble,” Ukraine’s Donetsk Governor Vadim Filashkin wrote on social media, adding later that the body of a 23-year-old man had also been found.

One more person was feared buried under the piles of broken concrete and debris, he added.