Frida Ghitis
U.S. President Joe Biden’s first opportunity to pivot away from Donald Trump’s often cozy approach to Russia came just days before he took office. The Kremlin’s swift detention of President Vladimir Putin’s chief critic, Alexei Navalny, when he returned to Moscow on Sunday—five months after surviving a failed assassination attempt—presents Biden with perhaps unwelcome pressure to respond quickly. But it also gives his administration the chance to accelerate its goal of reversing four years of silence on Russia from the White House and simultaneously restarting diplomatic coordination with much-neglected European allies.
Navalny’s decision to return to Russia was either foolish or brave, depending on your view of personal sacrifice for a higher cause. Everyone, including himself, knew Putin would not countenance his presence.
It is all but certain that Russian agents tried to kill Navalny in August. While on a commercial flight over Siberia, he became gravely ill. The pilot diverted to a local hospital, where Navalny lay in a coma on the verge of death. After much pressure, Russian authorities finally allowed his medical transfer to Germany, where doctors in Berlin determined he had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the KGB and used by its successor agency, the FSB, when it tried to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a double agent, in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Putin has denied responsibility for Navalny’s poisoning, even joking that if Russian agents had wanted to kill him, “they would have probably finished the job.”
Adding weight to the claims that the FSB tried to kill him, Navalny released audio last month of a damning phone call in which he said he tricked an FSB agent into thinking he was one of his superiors. Navalny cajoled him into describing the entire operation and essentially confessing that he had tried to assassinate him.
As in just about everything having to do with Putin, Trump reacted to the attempt to kill Navalny by defending the Russian president. He was asked about the incident during a White House briefing on Sept. 4, while Navalny was still in a coma in Berlin. Trump rejected the claim that Putin was responsible, saying he had not seen “any proof yet” of Russian involvement, and suggested focusing on another country instead. “It is interesting that everyone’s always mentioning Russia,” Trump said, “but I think probably China at this point is a nation you should be talking about much more so than Russia.”
As the evidence against Russia mounted, Trump was asked again about Navalny’s poisoning weeks later. After an awkward pause, he declared, “We’ll talk about that at another time.”
Trump’s reaction to the attempt to assassinate Navalny was consistent with his approach to Putin throughout his presidency. At a press conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump notoriously accepted his denials about Russia interfering in the 2016 election, dismissing the conclusions of America’s own intelligence agencies. He refused to condemn Russia after U.S. intelligence discovered Moscow was paying Afghans to kill American soldiers, or when a Russian military vehicle in Syria deliberately rammed an American one, injuring four U.S. soldiers—to name just a few of the perplexing occasions when Trump was unwilling to rebuke Putin, even in the defense of Americans.
Still, other members of Trump’s Cabinet did speak out, and his administration even acted against Russia, including by imposing sanctions. Under Trump, Washington seemed to have two parallel but often contradictory foreign policies, perhaps best encapsulated by the moment Trump phoned Putin following his dubious reelection in Russia’s nondemocratic vote in 2018 and proceeded to congratulate him, ignoring the briefing materials from his national security staff, which in large capital letters advised, “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
Biden would probably prefer not to start his term with a harsh confrontation with Putin, but looking timid is a riskier option.
Trump had one policy, the State Department a different one. Sure enough, after Navalny’s detention Sunday, and the almost-immediate hearing in a police station in which he was remanded to jail, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement condemning the Kremlin.
By then, Biden’s incoming national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, had issued a statement of his own. “The Kremlin’s attacks on Mr. Navalny are not just a violation of human rights, but an affront to the Russian people who want their voices heard,” he declared on Twitter, calling for Navalny’s immediate release.
As observers have often noted, the voice of a U.S. president is a powerful tool, far more muscular than statements from the State Department or from other members of his administration. It’s a guaranteed bet that Biden will speak out against abuses by the Putin regime far more than Trump ever did. But a more important question is what policy changes may come along with the shift in rhetoric. The Navalny case will be the first test.
America’s European allies, pushed away by Trump, are watching closely. The European Union imposed sanctions on half a dozen Russian officials after Navalny’s poisoning. Several major European leaders have also spoken out after his arrest, but there’s a move afoot to do more. EU members Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia—formerly unwilling members of the Soviet Union—are pushing the EU to impose sanctions if Navalny is not promptly released.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed Western recriminations about the Navalny case, claiming it’s all an effort to divert attention from their own problems at home and “the deep crisis of the liberal model of development.” That rings especially hollow, since Putin had a ready-made excuse for arresting Navalny when he landed in Moscow. Navalny had been convicted in 2014 on fraud charges that the European Court of Human Rights called politically motivated. Under the terms of his release, he was supposed to report regularly to security officials. Since he was near death in Germany, he did not keep to that schedule, which was the pretext for his arrest.
Now Navalny is urging his supporters to protest this Saturday. “Take to the streets, not for me but for yourselves and your future,” he told them from the police station. “Don’t be afraid.”
The exhortation has set up potential clashes that will immediately test the new administration in Washington. The call from some EU members for more sanctions creates a complicated situation. Biden would probably prefer not to start his term with a harsh confrontation with Putin, but looking timid is a riskier option. In addition, he has the challenge of coordinating with Europe, which is also divided on how to act.
Germany’s Angela Merkel doesn’t want to jeopardize the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, an expansion of the existing pipeline under the Baltic Sea bringing Russian gas to Germany, which has already been delayed by U.S. sanctions. Some in Europe want construction of the new pipeline—one of the largest infrastructure projects in Europe today—to stop entirely as part of new sanctions.
Biden, facing no shortage of crises, would probably prefer not to have Russia on his front burner. And yet, it seems fitting that the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden presidency would include a visible turn in relations with Moscow. The pivot is coming.
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