The news of Alexei Navalny's passing on Friday gave the bitter debate in Washington over the appropriate level of force to use against Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin as President Joe Biden and his likely opponent, Donald Trump, have taken radically different stances on this issue.
The differences in the two men's responses to the news highlighted their variance, according to CNN.
“Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. Nobody should be fooled,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Friday, forcefully pinning blame on “Putin and his thugs.”
In contrast, Trump remained silent about the Russian opposition leader in a post that his team said represented his official reaction to Navalny's passing.
Rather, he devoted the better part of the morning to writing on Truth Social about his criminal cases, his election polling statistics, immigration in the United States, Nikki Haley, his opponent in the Republican primary, the Teamsters labour organisation, and the testimony of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia.
In the eyes of Democrats and a small number of Republicans who favour a strong US presence in Europe as part of NATO, Navalny's passing was just another heartbreaking reminder of Putin's cruelty and the need for an American-led campaign to isolate Moscow.
However, it remained unclear to doubters in the Trump camp whether the passing of Putin's main opponent in a notoriously harsh prison camp would soften the hardening belief that strong Western retaliation against Russian aggression is no longer necessary and that the nearly eight decades-old US-led security framework in Europe is out of date.
Biden sternly cautioned from the White House that "history is watching" the debate play out because the stakes could not be higher.
“The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten,” Biden said Friday. “It’s going to go down in the pages of history. It really is. It’s consequential. And the clock is ticking.”
The choice made by US officials in the upcoming weeks and months over whether to keep providing aid to Ukraine could have a significant impact on the situation on the battlefield there and send a message to the rest of the world about America's determination to not just stand up to Russia but also get involved internationally.
Even as the Kremlin claimed it was investigating the reason for Navalny's death, other senior Biden administration officials did not waste any time in assigning direct blame to Putin.