The United States will apply a new lesson against Moscow for the imprisonment of Russian opponent Alexei Navalni, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Sunday. “We are preparing another series of sanctions to apply in this situation,” he said four days after the summit in Geneva between US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
Alexei Navalni, leader of the main Russian opposition party, was transferred in a coma to a Berlin hospital in August 2020 following a poisoning in Siberia that he attributes to the Kremlin. He spent nearly six months recovering and was arrested in January upon returning to Russia.
On March 2, a few days after his incarceration, Washington applied sanctions to seven senior Russian officials, the first sanctions taken under Biden’s tenure, which began on January 20.
On the other hand, within the framework of the agreement reached between Putin and Biden after the bilateral summit held last Wednesday, the Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Antonov, traveled back to his legation yesterday. Antonov was called three months ago by Moscow to reassess relations with the United States amid escalating tensions between the two countries. It coincided with an interview in which Biden answered affirmatively to the question of whether he believed Putin “is a murderer”, which was followed by White House sanctions and the Kremlin’s expulsion of the US delegation on Russian soil.
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