President Biden is targeting several Russian officials for sanctions as punishment for the poisoning of activist Alexei Navalny, but the blacklist stops short of the oligarchs whom the dissident leader identified as the key power brokers in need of rebuke.
“This set of designations, though, is going to be focused on government officials, although government officials who have close ties to exactly the sorts of oligarchs and industrial tycoons … that Mr. Navalny has referred to,” a senior administration official told reporters.
U.S. intelligence officials have “high confidence” that a Russian security agency known as the FSB used a chemical weapon to poison Navalny, who survived the attack and received treatment in Germany, only to be imprisoned upon return to his home country. “Seven senior members” of the Russian government will see their assets frozen in response to the poisoning in a joint U.S. and European effort to retaliate over the incident.
“The United States is neither seeking to reset our relations with Russia, nor are we seeking to escalate,” another senior administration official said. “We believe that the United States and our partners must be clear and impose costs when Russian behavior crosses boundaries that are respected by responsible nations.”
ALEXEI NAVALNY TRICKS SPY INTO EXPLAINING ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION
The Navalny-related sanctions mark the second move to punish a foreign government for attacking a dissident in the last week, as Biden’s team rebuked Saudi Arabia for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi on Friday. U.S. officials stopped short of the most direct punishments, citing a desire to influence Saudi Arabia’s “future conduct” without causing a “rupture” in the U.S.-Saudi alliance. A U.S. government report found Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved Khashoggi’s murder, but the Biden administration did not pursue any form of direct punishment.
Biden’s team displayed a similar approach on the Navalny file. “We’re retaining the ability to go further, and, depending on our assessments of Russian behavior going forward, we will exercise further options as we need to,” a senior administration official said.
The new sanctions designations are “in many ways catching up” to allies after Donald Trump’s administration neglected to join the European powers in unveiling an initial round of sanctions in October, said one of the senior administration officials. Still, Navalny’s supporters previously have expressed disappointment with the European moves, although they had not given up hope that Western governments would take more effective action.
“Even if it’s too little … it’s the first time personal sanctions are applied with regard to human rights violations,” Navalny ally Leonid Volkov said last month. “So, it opens a way for further negotiation on this with Europe.”
The announcements come on the heels of reports that Navalny has been sent to Russia’s “harshest prison colony” to serve his two-and-a-half-year sentence; he was convicted of violating his parole by failing to communicate with a probation office while comatose in a German hospital.
Navalny has earned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s enmity by spotlighting the wealth of Putin’s associates while organizing a slate of candidates to unite the opposition and defeat Kremlin loyalists in local elections.
Kremlin officials have attempted to portray Navalny as a tool of the CIA rather than a true Russian dissident. And while Russian officials have denied FSB involvement in the attack on Navalny, Putin praised the FSB recently for countering political initiatives that he deems linked to hostile foreign influence.
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“The citizens’ constitutional guarantees of electing their representatives freely based on democratic procedures must be protected from any provocations,” Putin told FSB leaders last week. “In this connection, I would like to mention the effective and precise actions of our counterintelligence agencies last year. As a result, they cut short the activities of 72 career officers and 423 agents of foreign intelligence services.”
