The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska declined an invitation from the White House to attend President Joe Biden’s State of the Union (SOTU) address.
The alleged snub was somewhat unusual given the prestige of a choice SOTU seat and Ukraine’s fervent desire to remain in the good graces of the United States, the most pivotal supporter of Kyiv’s struggle against the Russian invasion. The White House reportedly offered to seat Zelenska next to U.S. first lady Jill Biden.
According to the Washington Post, Zelenska turned down the invitation because Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian dissident leader Alexei Navalny, was also invited to sit with Mrs. Biden during the speech.
The White House wanted the symbolism of Zelenska and Navalnaya sitting together while President Biden spoke, but the Ukrainian government was reportedly uncomfortable with the arrangement because Alexei Navalny was somewhat equivocal about Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Navalny, who died at the age of 47 under suspicious circumstances in an Arctic penal colony in February, was an outspoken Russian nationalist early in his political career. He supported Russia’s 2018 invasion of Georgia, for example.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears from prison on a video link provided by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, at a courtroom in Vladimir, Russia, on Tuesday, June 7, 2022 (AP Photo/Vladimir Kondrashov).
On the subject of Crimea, Navalny said in 2014 that he disapproved of Russian President Vladimir Putin seizing it by force – but now that it had been seized, it could not be given back to Ukraine.
Navalny felt that Russia had a historic claim to Crimea, and he disagreed with former Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev making it part of Ukraine in 1954. He castigated Khruschev’s decision as “voluntaristic, unfair, and illegal.”
One reason the Ukrainians have not forgotten these remarks is that Navalny was rather flippant about the fate of Crimea.
“Is Crimea some sort of sausage sandwich to be passed back and forth? I don’t think so,” he said when asked if Moscow should return the peninsula to Kyiv’s control.
In March 2014, Navalny wrote an op-ed for the New York Times (NYT) while under house arrest in Moscow in which he blasted Putin for trying to launch a “little war” in Ukraine. Navalny accused Putin of manipulating Russian feelings about Crimea to gin up “nationalist fervor” for the conflict he wanted, but he also said those feelings were genuine.
“It is true that the consensus in both Russia and Crimea is that the peninsula has historically been closer to Moscow than to Kiev. But the notion that this reunification should be achieved at the end of the barrel of a gun is supported only by Mr. Putin’s hard-core base,” Navalny wrote.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visit a military exhibition after attending an extended meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board at the National Defense Control Center in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2021 (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP).
Navalny’s nationalism mellowed over the following years, and so did his position on the annexation of Crimea. In February 2023, he published a political platform that included support for Ukraine’s borders as “internationally recognized and defined in 1991.” This would implicitly include Crimea under Ukrainian control.
Navalny strongly urged Russia to “leave Ukraine alone and allow it to develop as its people wish to” and to “stop the aggression, end the war, and withdraw all Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine.”
Alexei Navalny was half-Ukrainian on his father’s side and spent much of his youth near Chernobyl, but Ukrainians today have mixed feelings about him because he did not wholeheartedly oppose the annexation of Ukraine ten years ago. The official reason given for Olena Zelenska turning down her SOTU invitation was a conflict with “scheduled events, including a planned visit to Kyiv with children from an orphanage,” but seasoned Ukraine-watchers suspect the truth might be a little more complicated.
As things turned out, Yulia Navalnaya also reportedly declined her SOTU invitation. According to Alexei Navanly’s longtime spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, Navalnaya was fatigued following her husband’s death and funeral.
Leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya reacts on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union Foreign Ministers in Brussels, Belgium, on February 19, 2024. Navalnaya accused the Russian president of killing her husband and vowed to continue his work three days after he died in a Russian Arctic prison (Photo by YVES HERMAN / POOL / AFP).
“Yulia was indeed invited and considered going, but I think everyone forgets the circumstances against which the events unfolded. Yulia’s husband died two weeks ago. She’s been traveling all this time. Today is the first day she’s been home at all,” Yarmysh said.
“Like any human being, she needs time to recover, and so while she very much appreciates the invitation, she needs to recover at least a little now,” she said.
On Wednesday, the Kyiv Independent suggested the Biden White House made a mistake by not quickly informing Olena Zelenska’s office that Yulia Navalnaya had chosen not to attend the SOTU event, although it also quoted “individuals familiar with the situation” who said Navalnaya’s presence was “not the sole concern for Ukrainian officials.”
