Putin’s poison bill
US readies sanctions for attack on Navalny
The White House is preparing new sanctions against Russia over the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Sunday — as he defended President Biden’s much-criticized summit with strongman Vladimir Putin.
“We are preparing another package of sanctions to apply in this case,” Sullivan said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” morning show. “We’ve shown all along the way that we are not going to pull our punches, whether it’s on SolarWinds, or election interference, or Navalny when it comes to responding to Russia’s harmful activities.”
Navalny, 45, is currently imprisoned — and reportedly in poor health — for breaching the terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 embezzlement case, which he has dismissed as politically motivated.
The outspoken critic of Putin was arrested in January, shortly after returning to Russia from Germany, where he was recuperating from being poisoned on two separate occasions with a Soviet-era nerve agent. Navalny has blamed the attempts on his life on the Kremlin, accusations that Russian officials have denied.
Sullivan told CNN that the next round of sanctions will take effect once the United States can “ensure that we are getting the right targets.
“When we do that, we will impose further sanctions with respect to chemical weapons.”
The move comes less than a week after Biden and Putin met face-to-face in Geneva — a summit that left Republican lawmakers and seasoned diplomats feeling as though the president rolled over to his Russian counterpart.
In a separate interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Sullivan defended the president’s performance.
“Privately in the room, President Biden communicated to President Putin that there would be costs and consequences if harmful activities against the United States continued,” he said. “Publicly, in his press conference, he not only spoke out about that quite directly, mincing no words, but he also spoke about American values, something the last president never talked about.”
Sullivan said Biden pressed Putin on the imprisonment of Navalny, the need for Radio Free Europe and “about standing up for our democratic allies and partners.”
But host Chris Wallace noted that Republicans, including ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, criticized Biden for failing to be forceful enough and for allowing the Russian leader to hold a solo news conference in which he slammed the US response to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
“First of all, it’s pretty extraordinary to hear Donald Trump’s secretary of state talking about weakness in the face of Vladimir Putin when we all saw what happened in Helsinki,” said Sullivan, referring to the 2018 meeting during which Trump praised Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.