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Navalny team says Russia threatened his mother with ultimatum to avoid burial at Arctic prison
Warsaw — Russian authorities have threatened to bury Alexey Navalny at the Arctic prison colony where he died if his family does not agree to a closed funeral, the opposition leader’s team said Friday. Navalny, the most vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, died on February 16 after three years in prison on charges widely seen as retribution for his campaigning against the Kremlin.
Authorities have since refused to hand his body over to his mother, who arrived at the prison colony in northern Siberia last Saturday.
“An hour ago, an investigator called Alexey’s mother and gave her an ultimatum. She has three hours to agree to a secret funeral without a public farewell, or Alexey will be buried in the colony,” Navalny’s spokesperson Kira Yarmysh wrote in a social media post.
His mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, “refused to negotiate… because they have no authority to decide how and where to bury her son,” Yarmysh said. “She is demanding compliance with the law, according to which investigators are obliged to hand over the body within two days of establishing the cause of death. According to the medical documents she signed, these two days expire tomorrow. She insists that the authorities allow the funeral and memorial service to take place in accordance with normal practice.”
Alexey Navalny YouTube Channel/Handout/Reuters
Navalny’s team says Russian officials are “scared” of the opposition leader even after his death and are refusing to allow a public funeral that could become a show of support for his opposition to Putin.
The associates have also called Putin a “killer” who is trying to cover his tracks by not allowing independent forensic analysis of Navalny’s body.
Russian police have arrested hundreds of mourners at makeshift memorials to the opposition leader over the last week.
Navalny’s mother was allowed to view his body this week, but said the authorities “are blackmailing me — they are setting conditions where, when and how my son should be buried… They want it to do it secretly without a mourning ceremony.”
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Sen. Thom Tillis says “the scope” of Helene damage in North Carolina “is more like Katrina”
As recovery missions and repairs continue in North Carolina more than a week after Hurricane Helene carved a path of devastation through the western part of the state, the state’s Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for more resources to bolster the relief effort and likened the damage to Hurricane Katrina’s mark on Louisiana in 2005.
“This is unlike anything that we’ve seen in this state,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday morning. “We need increased attention. We need to continue to increase the surge of federal resources.”
Hurricane Helene ripped through the Southeast U.S. after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm. Helene brought heavy rain and catastrophic flooding to communities across multiple states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, with North Carolina bearing the brunt of the destruction. Officials previously said hundreds of roads in western North Carolina were washed out and inaccessible after the storm, hampering rescue operations, and several highways were blocked by mudslides.
Tillis said Sunday that most roads in the region likely remained closed due to flooding and debris. Water, electricity and other essential services still have not been fully restored.
“The scope of this storm is more like Katrina,” he said. “It may look like a flood to the outside observer, but again, this is a landmass roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts, with damage distributed throughout. We have to get maximum resources on the ground immediately to finish rescue operations.”
Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead after it slammed into Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in August 2005, flooding neighborhoods and destroying infrastructure in and around New Orleans as well as in parts of the surrounding region. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. in the last 50 years, and the costliest storm on record.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 229, CBS News has confirmed, with at least 116 of those deaths reported in North Carolina alone. Officials have said they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts were ongoing, and a spokesperson for the police department in Asheville told CBS News Friday their officers were “actively working 75 cases of missing persons.”
On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Transportation released $100 million in emergency funds for North Carolina to rebuild the roads and bridges damaged by the hurricane.
“We are providing this initial round of funding so there’s no delay getting roads repaired and reopened, and re-establishing critical routes,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration will be with North Carolina every step of the way, and today’s emergency funding to help get transportation networks back up and running safely will be followed by additional federal resources.”
President Biden previously announced that the federal government would cover “100%” of costs for debris removal and emergency protective measures in North Carolina for six months.
With North Carolina leaders working with a number of relief agencies to deal with the aftermath of the storm, Tillis urged federal officials to ramp up the resources being funneled into the state’s hardest-hit areas. The senator also addressed a surge in conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Biden Administration’s disaster response, which have been fueled by Republican political figures like former President Donald Trump.
Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the November presidential election, were diverting funds from Federal Emergency Management Agency that would support the relief effort in North Carolina toward initiatives for immigrants. He also said baselessly that the administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were withholding funds because many communities that were hit hardest are predominantly Republican. Elon Musk has shared false claims about FEMA, too.
“Many of these observations are not even from people on the ground,” Tillis said of those claims. “I believe that we have to stay focused on rescue operations, recovery operations, clearing operations, and we don’t need any of these distractions on the ground. It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their lives.”
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