U.S. sanctions 7 Russians over poisoning
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday announced punitive sanctions on senior Russian government figures over the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and reiterated a demand that Navalny be released from detention.
The sanctions block access to financial or other assets in the United States for seven top figures around Russian President Vladimir Putin.
They are largely symbolic but represent the first Biden administration action against Russia. U.S. officials who described the measures said they are a signal that the new administration will treat Russia differently than the Trump administration did.
“So to be clear, the United States is neither seeking to reset our relations with Russia, nor are we seeking to escalate,” said one official who spoke to reporters about the sanctions.
The Biden administration also announced new export restrictions on items that could be used to manufacture chemical weapons and a widening of existing sanctions under a law controlling use of such weapons.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the sanctions target seven senior Russian officials, including Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of the country’s main intelligence agency, the FSB. Other officials include two deputy ministers of defense and the head of the federal prison system.
Navalny was poisoned in August 2020. He recovered in Germany but was jailed upon his return to Moscow in January. He was sentenced to more than two years behind bars on what human rights advocates call manufactured charges.
The U.S. sanctions largely mirror actions taken by the European Union last fall. At the time, the Trump administration declined to join the action.
The E.U. added sanctions last month over Navalny’s imprisonment.
U.S. officials said the new actions are based on U.S. intelligence findings that implicated the Russian state with “high confidence.” Navalny was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok, which was developed as a Soviet weapon of war.
“Russian officials have targeted Mr. Navalny for his activism and efforts to reveal uncomfortable truths about Russian officials’ corruption and to give voice to Russian citizens legitimate grievances with their government and its policies,” one senior administration official said.
The sanctions in response to Navalny’s poisoning are just the first in a series of steps the administration is taking to hold Russia to account for destabilizing actions in four areas, senior administration officials said.
Coming “sooner rather than later” will be responses to Moscow’s Solarwinds hacks of federal agencies and private sector entities, any malign activity in the 2020 election and reports of Russian bounties on the lives of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, an official said. All four areas — Navalny’s poisoning, Solarwinds, election activity and bounties — were the subject of intelligence community reviews ordered by President Joe Biden on his first full day in office.