American intelligence agencies should find and expose the wealth of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his close associates in retaliation for the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, according to a senior Republican senator.
“I would guess it would make the Russian people pretty upset when they find out how many billions not only Putin but his close associates in his inner circle, how much those folks are worth,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the subcommittee for Europe, told the Washington Examiner. “I think that would be effective.”
Navalny’s sudden sickness has aggravated the tense relations between the Kremlin and Western powers, especially in the wake of Germany’s announcement that the dissident was targeted by the same type of chemical weapon used in a previous attempted assassination of a Soviet double agent. Russia already labors under sanctions imposed in response to that 2018 attack, in addition to the punitive measures imposed over the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, which shaped Johnson’s suggestion to make the punishment personal for Putin.
“We need to make sure that our sanctions are targeted and, hopefully very precisely, on Putin and the people that prop him up — make those people feel a lot of pain,” Johnson said.
He also suggested that Putin has “stashed” his wealth in foreign accounts. “I’m not saying it’s an easy investigation,” Johnson said. “I think we probably know more than what we reveal.”
Such a focus on high-level Russian government corruption would escalate the kinds of political campaigns that Navalny, the country’s foremost anti-corruption activist, was pursuing prior to his poisoning last month. Prior to the attack, he was working on a documentary about corruption in Siberia — focused on politicians from Putin’s United Russia party, with the explicit goal of undermining the Kremlin chief’s power base in regional elections this month.
“The United Russia deputies who sit in these [regional] parliaments are the actual backbone of the entire Putin’s (sic) regime,” the documentary says. “They are not cogs, but the foundation on which the ruling party, which has prevented us from living normally for 20 years, is built.”
That message, paired with a “smart voting” initiative designed to unite political opposition behind the most electable candidates regardless of party, poses the kind of threat that Putin’s allies do not tolerate, according to Western analysts.
“So this idea that you have to get people who are not kind of in Putin’s institutional circle of support, I think that has consequences,” said Tufts University’s Oxana Shevel, an expert in post-Soviet politics. “Because even if it’s local elections, you get people elected who are not willing to just listen to whatever the orders from above would be. That’s not something the regime would want to deal with. So I think that taking Navalny out, it’s not just about Navalny personally.”
U.S. and European officials have a similar reading of the incident, which top diplomats from the G-7, the world’s leading major industrialized democracies, condemned Tuesday as “another grave blow against democracy and political plurality in Russia” that “contravenes the international norms prohibiting the use” of chemical weapons.
“I hope the Russians won’t force us to change our position regarding the Nord Stream 2,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said this week, referring to a major energy pipeline project prized in both Berlin and Moscow. “If there won’t be any contributions from the Russian side regarding the investigation in the coming days, we will have to consult with our partners.”
Russian officials accused German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government of launching a “massive misinformation campaign” in order “to mobilize support for sanctions.” Trump also expressed uncertainty about the details of the attack, but Johnson observed that Berlin is usually the European government most opposed to American economic sanctions on Russia. “Germany’s got the proof, and let’s face it: Germany is not a country that would unnecessarily pile on Russia did they not have the proof,” he said, alluding to Merkel’s support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in defiance of President Trump’s denunciations of the project.
The Wisconsin senator suggested that Putin’s allies used a Novichok nerve agent in order to ensure that the attack would send a message to other potential opponents. “I think primarily it’s directed to anybody else who just might step out of line and try and replace or support people like Navalny,” Johnson said.
