How Biden can avenge Navalny’s death

President Joe Biden said last week that he is “looking at a whole range of options” to follow up on his 2021 warning to Vladimir Putin that Russia would face “devastating” consequences if Alexei Navalny died in prison.

Now that Putin has treated that warning with his usual disdain, Biden must act on it moral clarity and personal credibility, and by the strategic imperative of demonstrating to a dictator that American threats are not in vain.

But how?

Some analysts suggest that the administration, which promised to impose tougher sanctions on Tuesday, will struggle to find ways to make them more effective, and that the best policy to harm Putin is to continue to support Ukraine militarily.

They’re right about the latter.

However, as several close observers of Russia have told me, there is still much to be done on the former.

There are four general approaches.

The finance company:

“The most important thing we can do to respond to Putin is to enact legislation to confiscate the $300 billion in frozen Russian bank reserves for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine,” Bill Browder, an investor and political activist, wrote to me Monday . .

Browder is best known as the driving force behind the Magnitsky Acts, which imposed sanctions on Russian officials implicated in corruption and other abuses.

Browder’s suggestion isn’t new.

And he has met resistance from U.S. government officials who fear him overcome that US law permits and encourages flight from dollar assets.

But as Harvard jurist Larry Tribe and a team of experts from the law firm Kaplan, Heckler & Fink pointed out last year in a report for the Renew Democracy Initiative, the seizure of Russian assets is explicitly permitted as a “countermeasure,” an act aimed at forcing the aggressor to comply with international law.

As for the dollar flight argument, it could be convincing if there was no need to save Ukraine and punish Russia more urgent.

Confiscating Russia’s assets “would be the West’s finger in the eye,” Browder added.

“Putin doesn’t care how many soldiers die, but he cares deeply about their money. To make matters worse, all countries should call this new legislation the Navalny law“.

Recognition:

“Not recognizing Putin as president of Russia after March 17, it’s simple,” Garry Kasparov, the legendary chess and human rights champion, told me on the phone from Berlin.

“Do not recognize the regime as legitimate.”

Kasparov was alluding to next month’s fake presidential election, in which Putin will seek a fifth term.

But he also alluded to a deeper issue, which is that while Putin may be indifferent to questions of legality, he desires and is very attentive to the symbols of political legitimacy, especially at the international level, that strengthen his claims to rule.

Economist Konstantin Sonin, a University of Chicago professor arrested in absentia this month by a Russian court, made this point to me.

“Putin and his henchmen must be recognized and treated as a gang whose seizure of power in Russia is based on brute force and not on any kind of legitimacy,” Sonin said.

“There is no point in negotiating with Putin, as any kind of agreement will have to be renegotiated when his regime falls.”

Dissenters:

When Natan Sharansky called me from Jerusalem, that great Soviet Refusnik, who exchanged letters with Navalny last year, almost immediately turned to Vladimir Kara-Murza, another imprisoned dissident.

Like Navalny, Kara-Murza, 42, also survived poisoning and a coma.

Like Navalny, he is being held in a “severe regime” penal colony with a 25-year sentence for his opposition to Putin.

If there are no changes” in Western politics, Sharansky said, Putin “may kill Kara-Murza tomorrow.”

The West must understand that these dissidents are the true friends of the free world and must be seen as candidates for prisoner exchange.”

Sharansky was particularly critical of the 2022 trade of a Russian archenemy, Viktor Bout, for basketball star Brittney Griner, which surely prompted the Kremlin to arrest Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, last March.

“The United States has demonstrated that this is a bad negotiator“Sharansky complained.

Sharansky is assisted by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA official and member of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“The great Soviet dissidents taught us that they felt empowered by Western attention to their plight,” Gerecht told me.

“Today we don’t know which Russian dissident, which Russian on the verge of going ‘rogue,’ could galvanize Russians who detest the regime.”

Candies:

One of my sources for this article asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of his current position, but he is a longtime expert on energy markets.

“US liquefied natural gas is now part of NATO’s arsenal against Russia,” he told me.

Biden, he suggested, could “restore the United States’ credibility as an LNG exporter by lifting the administration’s ‘pause’ on new LNG permits and thus giving confidence to Europe and Japan stop importing Russian LNG“.

Although Russia’s oil and gas revenues have plummeted since the start of the war in Ukraine, they still hovered close to $100 billion last year, enough to fund the Kremlin’s war machine.

What else could do harm?

David Petraeus, a retired general and former CIA director, made a concrete suggestion:

“The White House should announce the supply of the Army’s tactical missile system to Ukraine, which would double the cost autonomy approximately 300 kilometres of missiles supplied so far by the United States.

Like everyone I spoke to, Petraeus acknowledged that such missiles could only be provided if the $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine approved by the Senate last week could overcome a wall of Republican opposition in the House of Representatives.

Every Republican who remembers what their party once stood for has an obligation to vote for that bill, just as Biden has a duty to ensure that evil does not go unpunished and that Navalny did not die in vain.

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