Biden readies his first major penalties on Russia - POLITICO

Feb 22, 2021

The Trump administration had prepared a sanctions package in response to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, but Biden’s national security team wants to chart its own course.

is preparing to respond to Russia’s poisoning and jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and is expected to coordinate a sanctions rollout with European allies in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.

The response would mark a break with the previous administration, which prepared a sanctions package following Navalny’s poisoning but never implemented it, the people said.

Navalny’s poisoning by Russian security forces last August and his recent jailing in Moscow has been deemed urgent enough to warrant a response, even if the broader review of U.S.-Russia policy — launched by the administration in January — is still ongoing, said the people familiar with the internal discussions.

While the new National Security Council’s broader Russia review has yet to be completed, the Biden administration is not starting from scratch on the Navalny issue — it inherited a comprehensive sanctions package from the previous administration, which was handed over during the transition process, two of the people familiar with the transition said.

The package proposed three types of sanctions: Magnitsky Act sanctions on the individuals who detained Navalny; sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act); and sanctions under Executive Order 13382 — which is “aimed at freezing the assets of proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their supporters,” according to the State Department.

The Trump sanctions package also proposed revoking certain Russian officials’ visas and restricting the export of certain dual-use items to Russia that could be used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

Ryan Tully, who served as Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the NSC in the final six months of the Trump administration, said U.S

“Sanctioning Russia using the CBW Act, Magnitsky Act, and/or EO 13382, for the poisoning of Alexei Navalny is an important step in that it reinforces the global norm against chemical weapons use,” Tully said