White House denounces attack on Russian opposition leader
Washington — The White House on Thursday denounced the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and suggested that the United States might retaliate if the Kremlin is to blame, but President Donald Trump has failed to repudiate the attack himself, prompting criticism that he is once again being soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the poisoning “completely reprehensible” but did not address a question about whether Trump has “made his voice known to the Russian government.”
It was the strongest U.S. condemnation yet of the attack two weeks ago using what a German military lab says was a banned chemical weapon. Navalny survived and is now under treatment in Germany.
Still, Trump himself has remained almost entirely silent on the attack on the most prominent domestic critic of Putin. Trump had said nothing on the matter since last Thursday, when he told reporters the United States was looking into the then-unconfirmed reports that Navalny had been poisoned.
The silence led Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to say Trump is complicit in a Kremlin attempt to silence a political opponent, and others of Trump’s critics to say he is beholden to Putin, an authoritarian leader Trump has said he admires.
Trump has a pattern of publicly declining to confront
Putin or to directly accuse the Russian leader of wrongdoing.
The president has said he did not question Putin about intelligence reports that Russia has offered to pay bounties to militants to kill American forces in Afghanistan, and he initially refused to pin blame on Russia for an earlier poisoning attempt in Britain.
He publicly took Putin’s word over that of U.S. intelligence agencies that had concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump. Intelligence agencies have found that Russia is trying to do the same thing ahead of Trump’s effort to win reelection this year.
“We’re deeply troubled by the results” of a German military analysis of the agent used to poison Navalny, McEnany said Thursday, adding that Russia “has used chemical nerve agents in the past.”
Germany had announced that tests on Navalny showed he had been poisoned by the chemical nerve agent related to Novichok, which was developed under the Soviet Union. Navalny’s wife and supporters say he was poisoned at an airport cafe while traveling in Siberia, where he has worked to support opposition political candidates.
Navalny remains in a medically induced coma.
Biden issued a statement Wednesday blaming Moscow and saying that Trump’s “silence is complicity.”
“The Kremlin no doubt thinks that it can act with impunity. Donald Trump has refused to confront Putin, calling him a ‘terrific person,’” the former vice president said.
He pledged to “do what Donald Trump refuses to do: work with our allies and partners to hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes.”
McEnany said the United States would work alongside other countries “to hold those in Russia accountable, wherever the evidence leads, and restrict funds for their malign activities.”
That hinted at further financial sanctions, though U.S. officials did not elaborate. The Trump administration has imposed severe financial sanctions on Russia over its 2016 election interference and its invasion of Ukraine, and applied further sanctions in response to the 2018 nerve agent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter Yulia at their home in Britain. Russia denies any involvement.
Trump dragged his feet in condemning the attack on an ally’s soil and in assigning blame. Republicans in Congress were among those urging a more direct and forceful response. In the end, Trump appeared to have had little choice but to apply sanctions. Under a 1991 law, he was required to act once the administration determined Russian responsibility for a chemical or biological weapons attack.
Trump faced criticism for his tepid response to the Skripal poisoning. The Washington Post previously reported that in a summer 2018 call with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder.