Upon entering office, President-elect Joe Biden should immediately introduce sanctions against two Vladimir Putin cronies: Alexander Lukashenko and Alexander Bortnikov. For whatever reason, President Trump has avoided sanctioning these obvious American adversaries.
Starting his presidency with these sanctions, Biden would send a clear message that he’ll stand in defense of democracy and against assassinations of peaceful political activists. Those concerns speak to good governance, the advancement of the rule of law, and the undermining of adversaries who use coercion to trammel American friends.
In Lukashenko’s case, it’s the issue of escalating domestic repression. Having stolen Belarus’s Aug. 9 election with a statistical re-imagination that would make Kim Jong Un proud, Lukashenko is now using violence to force his protesting people off the streets. Enabled by the Russian security services, Lukashenko is kidnapping, beating, and torturing political opponents. The dictator senses that if he spills enough blood, his people will be forced back into compliance. To be clear, what we’re seeing in Belarus is the theft of an election matched to the terrorizing of the people. It should not stand. Lukashenko should have any U.S. assets seized, and his regime’s access to the international banking system obstructed. There’s another reason for Biden’s action. Namely, the fact that Lukashenko is offering Putin his territorial fealty in return for Russia’s support. That poses a longer-term threat to NATO’s Baltic and Polish allies.
Next up, there’s Alexander Bortnikov. The director of Russia’s FSB domestic security service, Bortnikov was instrumental in the August Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Alexei Navalny. An investigative journalist and political opposition figure, Navalny has identified vast personal corruption among dozens of officials close to Putin. This, presumably, was what led the FSB to poison Navalny.
The U.S. National Security Agency identified the FSB’s culpability after Moscow panicked and surged FSB officers to Omsk hospital, where Navalny was transported after being poisoned. The FSB had expected Navalny to die without being able to seek medical assistance. When that didn’t happen, and Navalny was instead transported to the hospital, Bortnikov ordered the FSB to threaten the hospital’s medical team into remaining quiet about the nature of Navalny’s illness. Those officers also forced the doctors into falsely stating that Navalny was too ill to travel to a German hospital. The hope was that this would allow for evidence of Novichok to evacuate Navalny’s body. It didn’t work. Novichok was confirmed as present in Navalny’s system, and the journalist is now recovering.
Still, the need for U.S. sanctions action is clear. Putin’s use of Novichok against Navalny represents his utter disregard for Russia’s treaty obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention. And while Bortnikov has now been sanctioned by the EU over his role in Navalny’s attempted assassination, he has thus far avoided U.S. sanctions. Biden should change that. The U.S. has a material national security interest in deterring the use of weapons of mass destruction. If Putin sees no consequences for his use of those weapons, he’ll keep doing so. And he’ll tolerate the continued use of those weapons at scale by allies such Syria’s Bashar Assad.
It’s a shame that the incumbent president isn’t acting on these concerns. His replacement should correct that error.
