When Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in 2021, the leaders staring at each other across the library of a Geneva lakeside villa, the US president warned there would be “devastating consequences” for Moscow if Alexei Navalny died in Russian custody.
Biden was reminded of those words on Friday following Navalny’s sudden, mysterious death in a Russian penal colony, and his response was to point out that the warning had been delivered three years ago and that, in the intervening time, Putin had “faced a hell of a lot of consequences”.
The consequences the president went on to list included Russia’s losses in the Ukrainian war, including 350,000 troops dead or wounded, and “great sanctions across the board”.
“We’re contemplating what else could be done,” Biden added. “We’re looking at a whole number of options.”
It is not clear what Biden’s options might be. The consequences he spelled out on Friday were almost entirely those which Putin has brought on to his own country with his disastrous invasion of Ukraine, rather than for his treatment of Russia’s most famous dissident.
They have indeed been damaging for the country as a whole, but they have so far failed to topple Putin’s regime or forced him to call off his invasion. Instead, he has put the Russian economy on a war footing, privileging the defence sector, rebuilding the army and allowing the pain of sanctions to fall largely on Russian civilians.
Biden and allied leaders are now faced with the dilemma of what they could possibly do that would make any difference to the Kremlin. As Biden implied, the greatest cost the west has inflicted has been in the form of military aid to Ukraine, helping Kyiv fight back and recapture more than half the territory lost in the 2022 full-scale invasion. But now continued US military assistance is being held hostage by the Republican leadership in Congress which is loyal to Donald Trump, who has consistently been admiring of Putin and disparaging of Nato.
Trump has played a decisive role behind the scenes in holding up a supplemental budget bill authorising further arms supplies to Ukraine and is well placed to win back the presidency in November elections, further tightening his hold on his party.
Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House foreign affairs committee and a traditional national security conservative, said he was still hopeful Ukraine aid could be passed in the spring.
Asked if Navalny’s death would change any minds in Ukraine’s favour, McCaul said that it would be only “to the extent members of Congress know who he is”.
What was far more important, he conceded, was what Trump decided. That would give a cue to his followers in Congress. “I think he’s probably thinking: do I want to be the guy that comes in to fix the problem? Or was I the guy that just watched it implode, or advocated for its implosion?” McCaul said. “He has to make that decision.”
Trump’s political resurgence and the rise to the House speakership of Mike Johnson, a sceptic on Ukrainian aid, has robbed Biden of much of his clout when it comes to making Putin pay for his crimes, and the president voiced his frustrations on Friday.
“History is watching the House of Representatives. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten,” Biden said, fuming about Congress’s “bizarre” decision to embark on a two-week holiday before an agreement on the budget bill.
He admitted that the impasse was reinforcing “real concern about the United States being a reliable ally” around the world.
“This is a really dangerous, and a really frustrating, position the west is in,” said Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and the author of a new book, Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World. She pointed out that Putin’s regime was unlike the post-Stalin Soviet system, which generally sought to preserve a veneer of respectability. “Once you have decided, as Putin has done, that you don’t care about being seen as a respectable regime, then you can do whatever you like, and the west can do nothing to exert influence over you,” Braw said.
The US Treasury highlights the impact of sanctions, arguing that the Russian economy “is over 5% smaller than had been predicted prior to the escalation”, and pointing to waning trade, a weak rouble, and high inflation.
Putin has responded to the pressure by using the tools of a large command economy to funnel 40% of government spending towards defence. The effort to cut off the Russian arms industry from advanced US electronics has been only partially successful, as smuggling routes have been created through many of Russia’s neighbours.
“It diminishes Putin’s ability to wage war so it helps, but it is very difficult to maintain because it increases margins for those who help Russia avoid sanctions – so avoiding sanctions becomes exceedingly profitable business,” Konstantin Sonin, a dissident Russian political economist at the University of Chicago, said.
Braw said: “The west is imposing sanctions that would have been crippling 30 years ago, but because there are so many other countries willing to trade with Russia, they don’t have the blunt force they would have had years ago. That’s why Russia has managed to get through pretty well.”
She was sceptical about calls to seize Russian assets around the world that were frozen after the Ukraine invasion.“To seize assets, you have to prove that they are part of a criminal activity or criminal act,” she said. “You would need to engage in criminal investigations of all this money, and then they would be able to see whichever parts were used for criminal activities, but that’s not going to be most of these funds.”
One other area worth exploring, Braw suggested, could be sanctions targeting the children of implicated Russian officials, who are now living comfortably in the west.
“Everybody loves her children more than anything else,” she said. “For Russian officials to see their children lose their good life in the west would be quite powerful.”
Such actions could impose some added discomfort to the Russian elite around Putin, but it is highly unlikely to divert him from the course he has embarked on.
