9/22/20
It is now an established fact, confirmed by laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union. In the face of Kremlin stonewalling, many questions remain unanswered and are likely to remain so. Chief among them is whether President Vladimir Putin ordered or approved the attempted assassination. Then there is the fact that once again, the victim survived the attack, and the nerve agent was identified. Whatever the full story, the Russian government’s contemptible posturing as an aggrieved victim of unfair suspicions only intensifies the need to demand a reckoning from the Kremlin. Mr. Putin knows what happened, or he can find out, and if he continues to hide behind glaringly phony denials and ridiculous accusations, he only strengthens the suspicion that this was a deliberate, state-sanctioned hit. He had the greatest motive, means and opportunity. Mr. Navalny was by far the best known and most visible of Mr. Putin’s political opponents. His exposés of official corruption — most famously of the extravagant properties owned by the former president Dmitri Medvedev — were widely circulated, detailed and credible. Those who tried to kill him had to know, and not care, that the attack could be seen only as an attempt to silence a strong and effective political voice.
Even more appalling was their deployment of a banned chemical weapon on Russian soil against a Russian politician. Russia is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and after Germany established that Mr. Navalny had been poisoned, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons issued a statement that under the convention, “any poisoning of an individual through the use of a nerve agent is considered a use of chemical weapons.” At the very least, that obligates Russia to establish how a known nerve agent came to be used in the center of Russia. Mr. Putin must believe that there is not much the West can do that it hasn’t already done by way of sanctions. President Trump, for reasons that remain one of the top mysteries of his administration, has largely closed his eyes to Mr. Putin’s serial transgressions. Yet, as Mr. Putin looks intent on spending the rest of his life at Russia’s helm and displays ever less concern for human rights or the rule of law, it is incumbent on the West to hold him accountable for murdering or trying to murder anyone he finds troublesome. A state prepared to use banned chemical weapons against its own citizens is a danger and threat to the rest of the world as well, and that must be made clear and unambiguous also to Mr. Putin and his co-conspirators.
