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Washington, DC –House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican Michael McCaul has released the following statement on the Biden Administration’s announcement the United States, in coordination with the European Union, has imposed new sanctions on senior members of the Russian government in response to the poisoning and wrongful detention of leading Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny. The United States has also expanded sanctions under the U.S. Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991, which Rep. McCaul has previously called on the administration to use robustly.

“I have called on the administration to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his unconscionable attempts to silence his opponents, and I support their actions today to implement these sanctions. The people in Russia, like Navalny, who have bravely worked to expose the corruption that serves as the lifeblood of Putin’s kleptocratic regime, deserve to have the full support of the United States and other democratic countries. However, in order to send an unmistakably strong message to the Kremlin, I also urge the Biden Administration to ensure the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Putin’s most lucrative Russian malign influence project, is never completed by fully implementing congressionally-mandated sanctions.”

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