The apparent death of Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny has brought new urgency to the need for Congress to approve tens of billions of dollars of aid for Ukraine, Joe Biden said on Friday.
The US president put the blame for Navalny’s death squarely on Vladimir Putin, adding “I hope to God it helps” to push US lawmakers to send more aid to Ukraine.
Biden said “history is watching” lawmakers in the House of Representatives, who have not moved to take up a Senate-passed bill that would send a $60bn military aid package to Ukraine, whose troops US officials say are running out of critical munitions on the battlefield.
“The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten,” Biden said. “And the clock is ticking. This has to happen. We have to help now.”
He also criticized House Republicans for letting the chamber enter a two-week recess without moving on the Ukraine funding.
“What are they thinking? My God,” Biden said. “This is bizarre, and it’s just reinforcing all of the concern – I won’t say panic but real concern – about the United States being a responsible ally.” Meanwhile, some leading Republican politicians also decried Navalny’s death, while pointing the finger at some in their own party for appearing to appease Putin.
“There is no room in the Republican party for apologists for Putin. RIP Alexey Navalny,” wrote the former vice-president, Mike Pence, on social media.
Pence added: “Putin is a war criminal and only understands strength”, and urged Congress to “set aside the politics of the moment” and to pass legislation supporting aid to Ukraine.
The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis also criticized Republicans who have expressed qualified sympathies for the Russian president.
“Navalny laid down his life fighting for the freedom of the country he loved,” Tillis said.
“Putin is a murderous, paranoid dictator. History will not be kind to those in America who make apologies for Putin and praise Russian autocracy. Nor will history be kind to America’s leaders who stay silent because they fear backlash from online pundits.”
Both men were apparently referring to members of the Republican party who have in recent weeks slowed the passage of the aid for Ukraine.
Last week, the Republican senator Ron Johnson was apparently moved to vote against the aid after watching Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson. Johnson said that while Putin “is a war criminal [who is] obviously not telling you the whole truth”, his sit-down with the former Fox News host was “very interesting”, and that “an awful lot of what Vladimir Putin said was right … accurate and obvious”.
Others, including the Republican congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a House Freedom caucus member, have recently expressed open admiration for the Russian president.
“Putin is a studied man of resolute spirit, and he always comes across as very sincere in his beliefs. You come away from a conversation with him thinking: ‘I may not believe what he says, but I know he believes what he says,’” Higgins has said.
In his address on Friday, Biden said that “history is watching the House of Representatives” and a “failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten. It will go down in the pages of history.”
While none of the leaders immediately put out statements about Navalny, the Republican congressman Michael McCaul, who heads the foreign affairs committee, said: “If confirmed, the death of Alexei Navalny is a tragedy. He was a voice for a better Russia amid the corruption and brutality of Putin’s genocidal regime. The Kremlin must be held to account for this outrage.”
Democratic leaders, for their part, expressed united outrage at Navalny’s death. The vice-president, Kamala Harris, called Navalny’s death in prison “a further sign of Putin’s brutality”.
“Whatever story they tell, let us be clear: Russia is responsible, and we will have more to say on this later,” Harris said at the top of keynote remarks at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Reports of Navalny’s death come days after the likely Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, said the US would not defend Nato allies from Russian attack, a core principle of the alliance, if they did not meet their obligation to spend 2% of their national economic output on defense.
On Friday, before the Navalny news, the Biden re-election campaign pushed out a fresh ad targeting Trump’s comments. “Trump wants to walk away from Nato. He’s even given Putin the green light to attack America’s allies,” it states, calling the former president’s rhetoric “shameful”, “weak” and “un-American”.
Speaking at the White House, Biden took another swipe at Trump for his Nato comments, saying: “All of us should reject the dangerous statements made by the previous president that invited Russia to invade our Nato allies if they weren’t paying up.”
Referring to Trump, Biden went on: “He said if an ally did not pay their dues, he encouraged Russia to, quote: ‘Do whatever the hell they want.’
“I guess I should clear my mind a little bit and not say what I’m really thinking, but let me be clear – this is an outrageous thing for a [former] president to say. I can’t fathom it.
“As long as I’m president, America stands by our sacred commitment to our Nato allies.”
Trump did not mention the Navalny reports on Friday in their immediate aftermath, and instead posted a message about how he would save the Teamster union from the effects of immigration and another about the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis.
The Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley hit out at Trump for his past praise of the Russian leader.
“Putin did this,” Haley wrote on Friday morning on X, in response to news of Navalny’s death in prison. “The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends. The same Trump who said: ‘In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.’”
