Prominent Democrat calls Biden administrator for missing deadline to further sanction Russia for Navalny poisoning

“The administration has yet to impose Congress-mandated sanctions in response to the attempted murder of anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, as required by the Chemical and Biological Weapons Act,” Senator Robert said. Menendez in a nomination hearing for several state departments and USAID. nominees. “These penalties were due June 2.”

Menendez pointed out that although these sanctions have been on hold since the Trump administration, neither administration has acted on them.

The Biden administration sanctioned a number of Russian officials and entities in March for the poisoning of Navalny in August, including two of President Vladimir Putin‘s deputy chiefs of staff, two Russian defense ministers, the Russian Prosecutor General, the Director of the Federal Prison Service and the Head of the Russian Security Services, the FSB, as well as the FSB as a whole.

However, the administration failed to enforce the sanctions mandated by Congress under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Act, according to Menendez.

The State Department has yet to respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Congress is concerned that the Biden administration has yet to impose these sanctions. Just before President Joe Biden’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, Senator Jim Risch, GOP member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Representative Michael McCaul, GOP member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House, sent a letter to Biden urging him to impose the sanctions.

“The delay in imposing these sanctions goes directly against your administration’s stated goal of using the summit with President Putin to defend our democratic values in the face of Putin’s authoritarian regime,” wrote Risch and McCaul.

Biden said in remarks after the summit that he warned Putin of the consequences if Navalny were to die in prison.

The U.S. intelligence community concluded with great confidence that Russian security services had poisoned Navalny with a banned nerve agent called Novichok. Navalny traveled to Germany for treatment and was arrested upon returning to Russia in January. An investigation by CNN and Bellingcat identified FSB specialists who followed Navalny before his poisoning.

Even after the March sanctions, activists called on the United States to impose new sanctions to hold Moscow responsible for the targeting of Navalny.

Shortly after Biden met with Putin, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN that the United States was preparing more sanctions in response to the poisoning of Navalny, but was vague on the timing.

“We are preparing another package of sanctions to be applied in this case,” Sullivan said of Navalny on “State of the Union”, referring to Navalny. Asked about the timing, Sullivan said the sanctions would come “as soon as we develop the packages to make sure we get the right targets.”

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