U.S. sanctions seven officials over Navalny poisoning
The Biden administration sanctioned seven mid and seniorlevel Russian officials on Tuesday, along with more than a dozen businesses and other entities, over a nearly fatal nerveagent attack on opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his subsequent jailing.
The measures, emphasizing the use of the Russian nerve agent as a banned chemical weapon, marked the Biden administration’s first sanctions against associates of President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader was an intimate and favorite of former President Donald Trump even amid covert Russian hacking and social media campaigns aimed at destabilizing the U.S.
The government officials included at least four whom Navalny’s supporters had directly asked the West to penalize, saying they were most involved in targeting him and other dissidents and journalists. However, the U.S. list did not include any of Russia’s most powerful business people and bankers, oligarchs whom Navalny has long said the West would have to sanction to get the attention of Putin.
Tuesday’s step “was not meant to be a silver bullet or an end date to what has been a difficult relationship with Russia,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. “We expect the relationship to continue to be a challenge. We’re prepared for that.”
The Biden administration also announced sanctions under the U.S. Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act for businesses and other enterprises, most of which it said were involved in the production of biological and chemical agents.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded with high confidence that Russia’s Federal Security Service used the Russian nerve agent Novichok on Navalny last August, a senior administration official said.
Russia critic Bill Browder, a Londonbased investor, tweeted that he feared the new U.S. sanctions would be “way too little and not touch Putin’s billionaire cronies.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, called the U.S. move overdue.
Working with U.S. allies, “we must use an array of tools, including sanctions, to meaningfully deter, repel, and punish Moscow’s transgressions,” Schiff said in a statement.
The Biden administration has pledged to confront Putin in alleged attacks on Russian opposition figures and in alleged malign actions abroad, including the hacking of U.S. government agencies and U.S. businesses. Trump spoke admiringly of Putin and resisted criticism of Putin’s government. That included dismissing U.S. intelligence findings that Russia had backed Trump in its covert campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
The administration coordinated the sanctions with the European Union, which added to its own sanctions Tuesday over the attack on Navalny.