Joe Biden says Putin ‘responsible’ for death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny

Joe Biden says Putin ‘responsible’ for death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday he was “not surprised” but “outraged” by reports of the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“He stood up to the corruption, the violence and all the bad things that were going on in Putin’s government,” Biden said at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s White House. “Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”

The White House is seeking more information about Navalny’s death in a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, where he was sent less than two months ago.

This development further cooled the already tense relations between the United States and Russia.

Navalny, 47, has been a major critic of Putin, and Biden said after meeting Putin in Geneva in June 2021 that Navalny’s death could have devastating consequences for Putin.

Biden and Putin remain deeply divided over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, and Biden has urged Republican hardliners in Congress to support additional funding to buy more weapons for Ukraine’s military.

As Biden seeks re-election in November, Russia looms large in the campaign.

His expected Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, said last week that he would not take any action to protect NATO allies from Russia unless they pay more for their mutual defense, sparking bipartisan tensions of anger.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, the top Republican in Congress, has not yet brought the Senate bill to provide new funding to Ukraine to a vote. After Navalny’s death, he said the United States and its allies should use “all available means to cut off Putin’s ability to fund his unprovoked war in Ukraine and aggression against the Baltic states.”

At a major security conference in Munich, Vice President Kamala Harris vowed that the United States would never abandon its post-World War II NATO alliance obligations, aligning Biden’s global engagement approach with that of the president-elect. Trump’s isolationist views stand in stark contrast.

A White House official said she also met with Alexei Navalny’s wife, Yulia, on the sidelines of the meeting and “expressed her sadness and anger” over reports of her husband’s death.

Biden’s presidential re-election campaign released a new minute-long ad on Friday condemning Trump for abandoning NATO. They plan to target the ad to the 2.5 million American voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who can trace their ancestry to the NATO countries that border Russia.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)