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.