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The announcement of Alexei Navalny's death on Friday brought new urgency to the tumultuous debate in Washington about how forcefully to stand up to Russia and its President Vladimir Putin. President Joe Biden and his leading opponent, Donald Trump, have raised the issue as one with far-reaching implications. The exact opposite position.
The difference in how the two reacted to the news highlighted the rift between them.
“Make no mistake: President Putin is responsible for Mr. Navalny's death. President Putin is responsible. What happened to Mr. Navalny is further proof of Mr. Putin's brutality. No one was fooled. They should not have been,” Biden said Friday in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, pushing the blame squarely on “Putin and his thugs.”
Meanwhile, President Trump did not say anything directly about the Russian opposition leader in a post that his campaign said was an official response to Navalny's death. Instead, he spent the morning talking about his criminal case, election poll numbers, immigration in the United States, Republican presidential rival Nikki Haley, the Teamsters union, and the testimony of Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis. , posted more than 20 times in the morning. Georgia.
For Democrats and a small number of Republicans who support a strong U.S. presence in Europe within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense alliance, Mr. Navalny's death highlights Putin's brutality and U.S.-led efforts to isolate Moscow. This served as a poignant reminder of the necessity of
But for skeptics in the Trump campaign, even the notoriously brutal death in a gulag of Putin, his chief critic, meant that Russian aggression no longer required a strong Western retaliation, and that It was far from clear that 80 years of stubborn views on Russian aggression would change. The old US-led security architecture in Europe is outdated.
The stakes couldn't be higher, and Biden strongly warned from the White House that “history is watching” how the debate unfolds.
“Our failure to support Ukraine at this critical time will never be forgotten,” Biden said Friday. “It's going to be etched in the pages of history. It really is. It's consequential. And the clock is ticking.”
Decisions that U.S. politicians will make in the coming weeks and months about whether to continue aid to Ukraine will dramatically change the realities on the battlefield in Ukraine, and will not only push Russia back but also engage it abroad. It could send a global signal of American ambition.
Other Biden administration officials spent little time placing blame directly for Mr. Navalny's death on Mr. Putin, even though they said the Kremlin was working to determine the cause.
Vice President Kamala Harris said at the beginning of her speech at the Munich Security Conference: “Whatever they talk about, let me be clear that Russia is responsible. More on that later.'' There will be more to say.” Commitments to NATO have become a central and pressing topic of conversation.
Shortly before that, Secretary of State Antony Blinken directly linked Navalny's death to the Russian president.
“His death in a Russian prison, and the obsession with and fear of a man, only underscores the weakness and corruption at the heart of the system that President Putin has built,” a top US diplomat said. He said this at the beginning of a meeting with Indian officials. Scenes from the Munich rally.
Beneath these statements was the reality that the long-held consensus within the United States about the value of alliances and systems for preventing Russian aggression was fraying.
Asked whether Congress might take further action on aid to Ukraine in the wake of Navalny's death, Biden expressed hope.
“I hope God helps me,” he said.
President Trump, who appears to enjoy undermining what has been a bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy for more than 70 years, said he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies that “didn't pay.” . This statement shocked the United States. The Defense Alliance was already preparing for his possible return to office in 2025, which came as little surprise to his followers.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican lawmakers have warned that new plans for Ukraine will be released, even though the Ukrainian military is running low on ammunition and the administration has warned that failure to help Kiev would amount to a victory for President Putin. The United States has refused to consider a spending package that includes about $60 billion in additional funds. Still, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a statement Friday that Putin was “likely to be directly responsible” for Navalny's death.
And Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host with a major conservative following, came back from last week's interview with President Putin (which Putin himself complained was too soft) and said that Moscow is proclaimed how nicer and cleaner it was than any other city in the world. President Trump is reportedly mulling over choosing Carlson as his running mate.
A select few Republicans are trying to protect themselves from growing isolationism within their party. On Friday, Trump's only remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, accused her opponent of making comments encouraging Russian invasion of other countries, calling them “extremely It's concerning.”
Haley said Putin was “absolutely” directly responsible for Navalny's death, then told CNN's Kaitlan: “That means Donald Trump is siding with thugs who murder political opponents.”・Told Collins on “The Source.''
“He stands with someone who has no desire to destroy America. He stands with someone who is arresting American journalists and holding them hostage. Instead of standing with allies who have helped us, we are standing with dictators,” Haley added.
For Biden and his top officials, attacks on international norms and institutions are both anger and concern. Biden was stunned to learn of President Trump's comments over the weekend and condemned them as “stupid” and “un-American” in his speech at the White House on Tuesday.
On Friday, the Biden campaign released a new digital ad slamming President Trump's comments.
“Every president since Truman has been a staunch supporter of NATO, except Donald Trump,” the narrator says, and images of Trump and Putin flash on the screen. “Mr. Trump wants to leave NATO. He even gave Putin and Russia permission to attack America's allies.”
The spot is part of a three-week, six-figure digital ad campaign that will run through Super Tuesday targeting voters in battleground states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The campaign aims to reach more than 2.5 million Americans who identify as Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, or Polish (all NATO member states that border Russia). He said he is aiming for
In 2021, Biden said that in his first (and so far only) face-to-face meeting with Putin, he warned his counterpart that he would be punished if Navalny died in prison.
“I made it very clear that I believe the outcome would be catastrophic for Russia,” Biden said at the summit in Geneva.
Since then, the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia have piled up sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, seeking to isolate it from the global financial system and ratchet up costs to the war perpetrators.
But it is the same sanctions that have caused energy prices to rise in Europe and hurt the global economy, giving momentum to some Republican efforts to halt foreign funding to Ukraine's military and call for an immediate end to the conflict. giving.
As U.S. aid to Ukraine falters, defense officials warn of battlefield repercussions. On Friday, officials told reporters that the United States ranks “16th in the world” among countries providing security assistance to Ukraine, considering its share of GDP.
“At this point, the United States is not the largest donor to Ukraine in terms of security assistance or economic assistance,” the official told reporters. “If you look at security assistance, our country is actually 16th in the world as a percentage of GDP. So we appreciate a lot from our allies and partners.”
Harris, who was already preparing to reassure shaken allies during a visit to Munich this week, sought to emphasize America's commitment to defending democracy and freedom around the world, and Trump suggested otherwise. secretly targeted him.
“They are capable of isolating themselves from the world, ignoring common understandings among nations, embracing dictators, adopting repressive tactics, and abandoning commitments to allies in favor of unilateral action. “It's in the best interest of the American people,” Harris said. In her remarks at an annual meeting of U.S. and European leaders that has traditionally served as a bastion of transatlanticism.
“Let me be clear: that worldview is dangerous, unstable and downright short-sighted,” she said.
Shortly after Harris left the stage, Navalny's wife made a surprise appearance in Munich to appeal to the international community to fight against Putin's “terrible” regime.
“They will be judged and that day will come soon,” she said.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN's Haley Britsky, Lauren Fox, Kate Sullivan and Kit Maher contributed reporting.
