Although the Navalny affair was a vivid example of Russian brutality – his FSB attackers chased him while he was traveling in Europe and apparently applied the nervous agent to his underwear – the Biden government sees SolarWinds as a more direct attack on the United States. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said the answer “will not be just sanctions” and suggested some kind of secret answer as well.
But in the Navalny case, only sanctions have been announced – and they may have little effect. History suggests that sanctions work best, if at all, in smaller and less powerful nations, and only over time. They are often used to signal disapproval without much expectation of a change in behavior.
As Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former prime minister and foreign minister, said: “Sanctions have become very popular in Congress and are also becoming popular in the EU. If you don’t have any other instruments, sanctions are very popular. “
In 2018, the Trump administration announced sanctions against Russia for using a nervous agent against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent living in Britain, and his daughter, Yulia, and expelled dozens of Russian diplomats. But that was little deterrent for the FSB to use the same technique against Mr. Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident who was poisoned in 2015 and 2017 and almost died both times.
A senior American official said the action announced on Tuesday was, in many ways, achieving the designations that Europeans had already made. The official said the main effort is to ensure that the United States and Europe are “on the same page” after several months in which European sanctions went beyond those imposed by Washington.
The European Union on Monday approved sanctions against four top Russian officials found responsible for the Navalny trial and arrest.
The decision, approved by member states, entered into force on Tuesday and represents the first time the European Union has used new powers in its version of the Magnitsky Act, which allows Brussels to impose sanctions on human rights violators worldwide.