Alexei Navalny’s medical team has confirmed he was poisoned in Russia last week. It’s time for President Trump to raise the dissident’s fate with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Such public leadership would serve Trump and the United States.
It has been reported that Trump, pursuing a new nuclear arms control treaty, wants to meet with Putin at next month’s United Nations General Assembly. Considering the global import of nuclear weapons proliferation and Russian advancements in hypersonic weapons, the meeting is a good idea. That said, it won’t succeed unless Putin arrives knowing that Trump is ready to play hardball. If he’s to make any significant concessions toward a deal, Putin must first understand that Trump is determined to defend the U.S.-led international order. While military investments are crucial to the credibility of that order, Trump’s commitment to it cannot end there.
That brings us to Navalny. A Russian investigative journalist and political activist, Navalny has illuminated numerous corruption scandals by the Kremlin elite. This has won Navalny few friends in Russian high society. He has been imprisoned and attacked on several occasions, but those incidents pale in comparison to what just happened. Shortly after boarding a domestic flight last Thursday, Navalny fell ill. His team quickly said that it believed his tea was poisoned at the departure airport. Navalny’s plane then made an emergency landing in Omsk, where doctors were initially helpful. However, after being confronted by Russian FSB intelligence officers, the doctors fell silent and refused Navalny’s relocation to Germany on a waiting medical flight. This was almost certainly due to an effort to flush from Navalny’s system whatever chemical had been used against him. I am led to believe that the U.S. intelligence community has incriminating evidence of Russian FSB efforts to control the doctors in Omsk so as to avoid their disclosure of Navalny’s poisoning.
So why should Trump now speak up about Navalny?
Well, on Saturday, Russia finally allowed Navalny to leave for Germany. On Monday, the activist’s Berlin doctors announced that he had been poisoned with a cholinesterase-acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, a central mechanism of nerve agents. Russia retains a very large stockpile of nerve agent weapons and variants. Original reports suggested Navalny may have been targeted with a hallucinogenic compound, which would entail weapons such as the 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate nerve agent. These weapons find favor with Russian assassination teams due to their ability to produce highly irrational behavior as well as extreme physical injury. Put simply, Putin’s people find these kinds of attacks quite funny.
The leader of the free world, however, must take a different stance in the face of this aggression.
Trump cannot afford to view this poisoning in a vacuum. Whether it’s polonium-210, Novichok, plant-based toxins, or whatever Navalny was targeted with, Putin continues to prove he feels comfortable using chemical and biological weapons against political enemies. As shown by his 2018 poisoning in Britain of a former spy and his daughter and the ensuing death of an innocent woman, Putin does not recognize borders in carrying out these attacks. Navalny’s plight reemphasizes the need to hold Putin accountable.
The best way to make that change is to make the costs of Putin’s poison campaigns greater than any benefits. Doing so will require sanction threats, but it starts with international unity. Trump must make clear that the U.S. regards Putin’s actions as an unacceptable threat to international order. Making that understanding public will upset Putin. Still, if it causes the Russian leader to abandon a U.N. meeting, it will show that Putin wasn’t serious about that meeting anyway.
The world still looks to the U.S. to lead. As he heads into a tight November election, there’s no better time for Trump to show he’s capable of doing so.
