OFFICIAL: U.S. PREPARING MORE RUSSIA SANCTIONS

President Joe Biden’s national security adviser said Sunday that the United States was preparing more sanctions against Russia in response to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the country’s most prominent opposition leader, days after Biden attended his first face-to-face summit with President Vladimir Putin.

“We are preparing another package of sanctions to apply in this case,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to Navalny’s treatment.

Sullivan was vague when pressed on the timing of the sanctions or what they would include, saying only that additional action would come “as soon as we develop the packages to ensure that we’re getting the right targets.”

“When we do that,” he said, “we will impose further sanctions with respect to chemical weapons.”

In April, the Biden administration imposed its first sanctions on Russia for the poisoning and imprisonment of Navalny. But those penalties were not specifically directed at Putin or the oligarchs who support him.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said there was no significance to the timing of Sullivan’s remarks. “The law requires we keep looking at sanctions targets connected to chemical weapons use,” she said, noting that there had been “no change from before the summit to after the summit.”

Biden and Putin both described their three-hour meeting in Geneva on Wednesday as positive, despite few concrete actions to come out of it other than an agreement to send ambassadors back to each other’s capitals.