The Trump administration should respond more resolutely to Alexei Navalny’s poisoning. The formative U.S. and allied intelligence assessment is that the attack was highly likely to have been ordered by very high-ranking Russian officials and by Russian intelligence officers.
Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok-class high-concentration nerve agent while he traveled from Tomsk, Siberia, to Moscow on Aug. 20. The use of Novichok is strictly restricted, even within the big three Russian intelligence services (the GRU, FSB, and SVR) and, at least since mid-2018, is weaponized only on Vladimir Putin’s approval. This follows the GRU’s mayhem spree in March 2018, when its officers attempted to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a former agent of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. Skripal, his daughter, and a police officer were seriously injured but survived. Sadly, an innocent British woman was killed after she later found and sprayed herself with the GRU’s delivery device, a disguised perfume bottle. The outrageous attack on a NATO member state precipitated a NATOwide expulsion of Russian intelligence officers.
That brings us back to Navalny. A longtime thorn in Putin’s side for his uncovering of massive corruption at the highest Kremlin ranks, Navalny was able to survive his immediate poisoning. After an inexcusable delay following his admittance to a hospital in Omsk, Navalny was transported to a Berlin hospital, where he is now recovering.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration is taking an overly tentative approach to dealing with this latest Russian shredding of international chemical weapons conventions. Speaking with Ben Shapiro on Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked about Navalny’s situation. He responded that “when [people] see the effort to poison a dissident and they recognize that there is a substantial chance that this actually came from senior Russian officials…”
Pompeo’s “substantial chance” comment reflects a very significant degree of understatement.
I’m led to believe that the National Security Agency has the FSB and its Director Alexander Bortnikov dead to rights in directing FSB officers to flood the hospital where Navalny was first taken. Those officers were ordered to intimidate the Omsk hospital doctors into concealing the nature of Navalny’s poisoning and, for the same reason, restrict Navalny from being moved to Germany. Coincidentally or not, Tomsk (where Navalny was first poisoned) is only a four-hour drive from one of Russia’s primary weapons of mass destruction facilities (which operates undercover as a biological research facility). Regardless, considering the existing intelligence assessments as to line-of-control authority for Novichok weaponization, Pompeo is being rather generous to the Kremlin by offering only a “substantial chance” of its culpability. This stands in rare contrast with the normally docile European Union, which is now threatening to suspend Putin’s Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline.
As we recently editorialized, the Trump administration needs to lead here. Its present caution is an ill-advised strategy that only plays to the Democratic Party’s (normally exaggerated) claims that the Trump administration is weak on Russia.
