As Russian military forces have deployed at the Ukraine border, U.S. politicians have been weighing new sanctions to deter an invasion.

In the face of growing tensions, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been working to craft a new package of economic measures, with chair Bob Menendez anticipating proposing “the mother of all sanctions.” Though the package has yet to be agreed on, the goal is to signal the U.S.‘s commitment to protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and to add further costs to any Russian invasion.

Whatever happens, the U.S. Senate has switched into crisis response mode over Ukraine. As a result, other longer-running issues with Russia have received less attention. With President Vladimir Putin essentially demanding that the world focus on Ukraine, the first anniversary of the arrest of Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny passed with relatively little press attention. As U.S. senators seek a deterrent for future Russian action in Ukraine, a trial is in process, away from public view, that aims to lengthen Navalny’s prison sentence to 10 years. It also distracts from another upcoming anniversary, that of U.S. and EU sanctions on the men who used Novichok poison to try to murder Navalny in August 2020.

As a scholar of Russian and East European politics, I’ve observed how authoritarian leaders use distraction to keep adversaries off balance. It was a tactic used in the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia against citizen activists and deployed to lethal effect by Slobodan Milosevic to maintain power in Serbia. President Putin has deployed such tactics repeatedly in the past and, I believe, it is what he is doing now: The more he can ratchet up what the U.S. and its allies threaten in retaliation to an invasion of Ukraine, the more concessions he can claim to have won, simply by standing down. He wins credit for averting the crisis he engineered.

Read full story at The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/the-us-doesnt-need-to-wait-for-an-invasion-to-impose-sanctions-on-russia-it-could-invoke-the-magnitsky-act-now-176202

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