The announcement of Alexey Navalny’s death on Friday thrust fresh urgency into the roiling debate in Washington over how forcefully to counter Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, a question of wide-ranging consequence on which President Joe Biden and his likely opponent Donald Trump have adopted diametrically opposed positions.
The disparity in how the two men reacted to the news underscored the divide.
“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. Nobody should be fooled,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Friday, forcefully pinning blame on “Putin and his thugs.”
Trump, meanwhile, said nothing directly about the Russian opposition leader in a post that his campaign said was his official response to Navalny’s death. Instead, he spent the morning posting more than 20 times on Truth Social about his criminal cases, his election poll numbers, immigrants in the US, his GOP presidential rival Nikki Haley, the Teamsters labor union and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ testimony in Georgia.
For Democrats and a minority of Republicans who are proponents of a muscular American presence in Europe within the NATO defense alliance, Navalny’s death served as yet another grim reminder of Putin’s brutality and the necessity of a US-led effort to isolate Moscow.
But for skeptics in the Trump camp, it was far from clear whether even the death in a notoriously brutal prison camp of Putin’s leading critic would alter a hardening view that Russia’s aggression no longer requires robust western reprisals, and that the nearly 80-year-old US-led security architecture in Europe is outdated.
The stakes could hardly be higher,…
Read the full article here