It s Time to Sanction Russia for Poisoning Alexei Navalny | Opinion Matthew Zweig and Andrea Stricker
, Foundation for Defense of Democracies On 2/2/21 at 8:00 AM EST
Foreign Affairs last year, Joe Biden, at the time a presidential candidate, did not mince words when it came to Russia. We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms and stand with Russian civil society, Biden wrote, promising that if elected, he would push back forcefully against Russian President Vladimir Putin s escalating malfeasance.
Will President Biden follow those words with action?
The recent arrest and detention of leading Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has put this question front and center. He must now decide whether to formally determine that the Russian government used chemical weapons in August 2020 against Navalny. At the time, then-President Donald Trump declined to follow a U.S. law called the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control a
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The Kremlin has made multiple, strenuous denials: of having a secret chemical-weapons program; of having ordered intelligence agents to poison Navalny; and of the Novichok poisoning of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March 2018. A British woman who accidentally came into contact with the nerve agent died that July.
Navalny spent nearly five months in treatment and recuperation in Germany before flying back on January 17 to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested.
Before being ordered to serve 30 days in pretrial detention, he called on his supporters to take to the streets, which they did a week later, in the largest political protests that Russia has seen in years.
Biden should hold Russia accountable for Navalny poisoning, bipartisan House leaders say msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Moscow in Confrontational Mode Reacting to Biden’s Inauguration
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 18 Issue: 11
(source: Wikimedia Commons)
The Kremlin-controlled Russian media and top officialdom have greeted President Joe Biden and his administration taking power in the US with a massive, almost hysterical propaganda broadside. Kremlin news outlets have been castigating Biden as an old and senile figurehead president, who will hardly survive his four-year term and whose only purpose was to bring to power in Washington an extreme anti-Russian faction (Russian.rt.com, January 19). Other news outlets argue the situation is much worse: hopes that Biden would be an extremely weak president, opposed by a strong and consolidated GOP opposition led by Donald Trump, have been dashed by the unsuccessful January 6 assault on the US Capitol by a mob of badly organized militant Trump supporters. As a result, according to these news outlets, Trump left Washington an outcast, while t