President Biden faced his most significant early foreign policy challenge on Tuesday.

The challenge came via a Moscow judge’s sentencing of Alexei Navalny to more than two years in prison. The opposition journalist’s supposed crime is that he breached probation by receiving medical treatment after suffering an attempted assassination at the hands of Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence service. The U.S. intelligence community knows that the FSB was responsible for that August 2020 attack. The absurdity of Navalny’s sentence is defining in what it tells us about the nature of Vladimir Putin’s presidency and the endemic corruption at the heart of his regime.