For all the Biden administration’s talk of punishing human-rights abusers, it recently declined an opportunity to hit the Kremlin.
The Biden administration is slapping sanctions on several Russian government officials, in what it claims is a “whole of government approach” to punishing those responsible for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny and the sham trial in February that resulted in his imprisonment.
During a call with reporters this morning, officials confirmed that the measures would be announced later in the day, and that they would be implemented by a number of agencies, including Treasury, State, and Commerce, encompassing sanctions targeting certain officials’ assets and ability to acquire U.S. visas. Those measures were coordinated with the EU, which announced its own sanctions package targeting four senior Russian officials this morning, and they follow previous steps taken by the U.K. and the EU.
The U.S. sanctions also include the addition of 14 parties in Russia, Germany, and Switzerland to a U.S. government blacklist for their role in producing biological and chemical agents like the Novichok used to poison Navalny.
All of this is the first salvo in a policy rollout that the new administration pledges will realign U.S. policy toward Russia with its own approach. “The tone and substance of our conversations with Russia, and our conversations about Russia will be very different from what you saw in the previous administration,” a senior administration official said, echoing what President Biden and his top aides have promised for weeks.
The Biden administration will be declassifying intelligence related to “destabilizing Russian actions,” including the SolarWinds hack, and plans to respond over the next couple of weeks.
The senior official voiced this summary of the White House’s approach:
To be clear, the United States is neither seeking to reset our relations with Russia, nor are we seeking to escalate. We believe that the United States and our partners must be clear and impose costs when Russian behavior crosses boundaries that are respected by responsible nations. And we believe that there should be guardrails on how these adversarial aspects of our relationship play out.
But for all the Biden administration’s talk of punishing human-rights abusers, it recently declined an opportunity to hit the Kremlin over its construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, earning the ire of members of Congress of both parties.
When a congressionally mandated deadline to designate entities involved in constructing the pipeline came about last month, the Biden administration chose only to name a company and a ship that had previously been designated by the Trump administration.
Eastern European countries, such as Ukraine and Poland, say that if completed, the project would strengthen the Kremlin’s stranglehold on Europe’s energy supply, therefore undermining their security. The German government, though, has vigorously defended Nord Stream 2, which has a number of Germany stakeholders, including former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who chairs the pipeline’s board.
A source close to Ukraine’s president told Axios last week that Ukrainians are disappointed in Biden’s refusal to speak out about the pipeline during the Munich Security Conference. Biden, who has spoken extensively about repairing America’s alliances, is seen as wary of challenging Chancellor Angela Merkel on the pipeline.
Refusing to take further steps to prevent completion of Nord Stream 2 — which human-rights advocates have urged governments to target in response to Navalny’s poisoning — suggests that, so far, the White House has little interest in taking meaningful steps to link Russia’s foreign policy with its dismal human-rights situation at home.
The symbolic nature of today’s announcement reverses the previous president’s refusal to speak out about Navalny — but the White House’s stance is also a rejection of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to concretely counter malign Russian activity.