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    U.S. to Impose Sanctions on More Than 500 Russian Targets

    A package of economic restrictions to be announced on Friday will be the largest since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago.The United States plans to impose sanctions on more than 500 targets on Friday in its response to Russia over the death of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, the largest single package in a flurry of economic restrictions since the country’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, according to a Treasury Department spokeswoman.The new measures, which are set to be rolled out by the Treasury and State Departments on Friday morning, come after the White House signaled this week that it was preparing “major” penalties after the recent death of Mr. Navalny in a Russian prison. It is not clear which sectors or individuals the Biden administration plans to target, a crucial variable in the sanctions’ ultimate expansiveness and effectiveness.As the war approaches its third year, the Biden administration has become increasingly reliant on using its financial tools to try to damage and isolate Russia’s economy. It has worked with allies from the Group of 7 nations to cap the price at which Russian oil can be sold on global markets, frozen hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian central bank assets, and enacted trade restrictions to try to block the flow of technology and equipment that Russia uses to supply its military.The United States has been closely coordinating with Europe in its efforts to cut Russia off from the global economy. This week, the European Union unveiled its 13th tranche of sanctions on Russia, banning nearly 200 people and entities that have been helping Russia procure weapons from traveling or doing business within the bloc. Britain also announced sanctions this week on companies linked to Russia’s ammunition supply chain, as well as on six Russians accused of running the Arctic prison where Mr. Navalny died.Despite the effort to exert economic pressure on Russia, it has largely weathered the restrictions. China, India and Brazil have been buying Russian oil in record quantities, and spending on the war effort has stimulated the Russian economy, which the International Monetary Fund said last month was growing faster than expected. More

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    Ex-FBI informant charged with lying about Bidens arrested again

    The former FBI informant who is charged with lying about a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving Joe Biden’s family was again taken into custody in Las Vegas, two days after a judge released him, his attorneys said.Alexander Smirnov was arrested during a meeting on Thursday morning at his lawyers’ offices in downtown Las Vegas. The arrest came after prosecutors appealed the judge’s ruling allowing 43-year-old Smirnov, who holds dual US-Israeli citizenship, to be released with a GPS monitor ahead of trial. He is charged with making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record.Attorneys David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld said in a statement that they have requested an immediate hearing on his detention and will again push for his release. They said Smirnov, who claims to have links to Russian intelligence, was taken into custody on a warrant issued in California for the same charges.Smirnov was first arrested last week in Las Vegas, where he now lives, while returning from overseas. A spokesman for justice department special counsel David Weiss, who is prosecuting Smirnov, confirmed that Smirnov had been arrested again, but did not have additional comment.Prosecutors say Smirnov falsely told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Joe and Hunter Biden $5m each around 2015. The claim became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry of President Biden in Congress.Smirnov has not entered a plea to the charges, but his lawyers have said their client is presumed innocent and they look forward to defending him at trial.As part of their push to keep him in custody, prosecutors said Smirnov told investigators after his arrest last week that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden. They said Smirnov’s self-reported contact with Russian officials was recent and extensive, and said he had planned to meet with foreign intelligence contacts during an upcoming trip abroad.US magistrate judge Daniel Albregts said on Tuesday that he was concerned about Smirnov’s access to money that prosecutors estimated to be around $6m, but noted that federal guidelines required him to fashion “the least restrictive conditions” ahead of trial. Smirnov was also ordered to stay in the area and surrender his passports.“Do not make a mockery out of me,” Albregts said to Smirnov, warning that he’d be placed back into the federal government’s custody if he violated any of his conditions. His lawyers say he had been “fully compliant” with his release conditions.Prosecutors quickly appealed to US district judge Otis D Wright in California.“The circumstances of the offenses charged – that Smirnov lied to his FBI handler after a 10-year relationship where the two spoke nearly every day – means that Smirnov cannot be trusted to provide truthful information to pretrial services,” prosecutors wrote in court documents.“The effects of Smirnov’s false statements and fabricated information continue to be felt to this day. Now the personal stakes for Smirnov are even higher. His freedom is on the line.”Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current role or previous office as vice president.While his identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, Smirnov’s claims have played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark what is now a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Republicans pursuing investigations of the Bidens demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.Democrats called for an end to the investigation after the Smirnov indictment came down last week, while Republicans distanced the inquiry from his claims and said they would continue to “follow the facts.”Smirnov’s lawyers say he has been living in Las Vegas for two years with his longtime girlfriend and requires treatment and daily medications for “significant medical issues related to his eyes”. He lived in California for 16 years prior to moving to Nevada. More

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    U.S. Warns Allies Russia Could Put a Nuclear Weapon Into Orbit This Year

    The American assessments are divided, however, and President Vladimir Putin denied having such an intention, saying that Russia was “categorically against” it.American intelligence agencies have told their closest European allies that if Russia is going to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit, it will probably do so this year — but that it might instead launch a harmless “dummy” warhead into orbit to leave the West guessing about its capabilities.The assessment came as American intelligence officials conducted a series of rushed, classified briefings for their NATO and Asian allies, as details of the American assessment of Russia’s intentions began to leak out.The American intelligence agencies are sharply divided in their opinion about what President Vladimir V. Putin is planning, and on Tuesday Mr. Putin rejected the accusation that he intended to place a nuclear weapon in orbit and his defense minister said the intelligence warning was manufactured in an effort to get Congress to authorize more aid for Ukraine.During a meeting with the defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, Mr. Putin said Russia had always been “categorically against” placing nuclear weapons in space, and had respected the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits weaponizing space, including the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit.“We not only call for the observance of the existing agreements that we have in this area,” he was quoted as saying by the Russian state media, “but we have proposed many times to strengthen these joint efforts.”On Wednesday, Mr. Putin reinforced the central role he believes Russia’s nuclear arsenal plays in the country’s defenses: Visiting an aviation factory, he climbed into the bomb bay of a Tu-160M strategic bomber, the most modern in the Russian fleet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Russia adds Republican senator Lindsey Graham to ‘terrorists and extremists’ list

    The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a key ally of Donald Trump, has been added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” kept by Russia’s state financial monitoring agency.Tass, the state-run news agency, first reported the move by Rosfinmonitoring, which allows authorities to freeze Russian bank accounts, though in Graham’s case is likely to be chiefly symbolic.The agency’s list includes more than 12,000 individuals and more than 400 companies, as well as domestic and foreign terrorist entities and Russian political opposition groups, according to the website opensanctions.org.Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was reportedly added to the list in October 2022, for supposedly tolerating “Russophobia”. Its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and other Meta employees have been banned from Russia or added to “wanted” lists.Graham, a South Carolina senator and foreign policy hawk who has long advocated arming Ukraine against Russian invaders, has also been subject to a Russian arrest warrant, for making “Russophobic statements” during a visit to Kyiv.“It’s difficult to imagine a greater shame for a country than having such senators,” Dmitry Peskov, the Russian government spokesperson, said at the time. Graham responded to the warrant by telling Reuters: “As usual the Russia propaganda machine is hard at work. It has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine from Russian war criminals.” He said he would “wear the arrest warrant issued by Putin’s corrupt and immoral government as a badge of honour”.Nonetheless, Graham is also a prominent ally of Donald Trump, the former president and prospective Republican presidential nominee who is generally held to favour Russia and Putin.This month, Graham voted against a $95bn defense and foreign aid package that would significantly boost Kyiv. On Sunday, Graham told CBS he backed a $66bn counter-proposal from House lawmakers of both parties, adding: “I want to turn the aid package into a loan, that makes perfect sense to me.”That echoed Trump, who has demanded aid to Kyiv should be turned into loans. “I think that’s a winning combination,” Graham said. “Let’s make it a loan. I think that gets you President Trump on the aid part.”Lamenting the killing of Alexei Navalny, the most prominent leader of opposition to Putin, who died in a Russian penal colony last week, Graham also said Russia should be designated a state sponsor of terrorism.Republicans continue to seek to tie Ukraine aid to border and immigration reform, even though senators including Graham dynamited their own border deal with Democrats after Trump expressed opposition.On Tuesday, Graham tweeted: “I understand what happens if Putin wins in Ukraine. However, many members of Congress do not seem to understand what is happening to America every single day at our southern border. Count me in for helping Ukraine. But, we must help ourselves first. It’s time to get our broken border under control.”Speaking to the Hill, an unnamed Democratic senator bemoaned Graham’s flexible loyalties, saying: “He got sucked into the Trump orbit, and he is so zealously about his own self-preservation in South Carolina that he literally would push his mother in front of a train to get to where he needs to be.“I hate to say it because I actually like him.”’ More

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    Yulia Navalnaya’s X Account Is Suspended and Then Restored

    An account created by Aleksei A. Navalny’s widow on Monday disappeared and then returned hours later. The social media company said the suspension had been a mistake.The social media platform X temporarily suspended on Tuesday an account created by Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Aleksei A. Navalny, and then restored it, saying it had been mistakenly flagged by its automated security protocols.Ms. Navalnaya opened the account on Monday to announce that she would continue her husband’s work advocating for a free, peaceful and democratic Russia in the wake of her husband’s death in a remote Arctic prison. More than 90,000 users followed the account in its first 24 hours.But on Tuesday, the account and its activity suddenly disappeared, replaced by the words “Account suspended” and a note that X — the social media company formerly known as Twitter — “suspends accounts which violate the X Rules.”“Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules,” X’s safety team wrote on the platform later on Tuesday. “We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”Earlier in the day, Ms. Navalnaya wrote on the social network Telegram that “Twitter has imposed restrictions on my account, which I opened yesterday.”“According to the Shadowban Test service, my tweets are not shown in searches, and if you enter my name in the search bar, my page is not recommended among recommendations,” she wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Breaks Silence on Navalny Death, but Doesn’t Condemn Putin

    His winding social media post on Monday contained no reference to Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who has been widely condemned after the death of one of his most vocal critics, Aleksei A. Navalny.Days after the death of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny was first reported, Donald J. Trump broke his silence in a social media post on Monday that barely mentioned Mr. Navalny and that did not condemn President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Instead, he used Mr. Navalny’s death to suggest that his own legal battles amounted to political persecution.It was a note he hit first on Sunday, when he shared screenshots of an opinion essay that compared his relationship with President Biden to the one between Mr. Navalny and Mr. Putin.“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” the former president wrote on Truth Social on Monday, using an alternative spelling of Mr. Navalny’s given name. He pointed to what he called “CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”But the winding social media post contained no reference to Mr. Putin, who has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians in the United States and abroad amid speculation that he or the Russian government had a hand in Mr. Navalny’s death. Instead, Mr. Trump cited “Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions” in casting the U.S., in all capital letters, as a “nation in decline, a failing nation.”Mr. Trump, who has been indicted in four criminal cases and is facing 91 felony counts, was ordered on Friday to pay about $450 million, after a New York judge found in his civil fraud case that he had conspired to manipulate his net worth. He has repeatedly tried to blame Mr. Biden for his legal problems, though Mr. Biden has no purview over the cases.Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s rival in the Republican presidential primary and his former ambassador to the United Nations, attacked him over his response.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    US could send long-range missiles to Ukraine if funding passes – report

    Joe Biden’s White House is prepared to send long-range tactical missiles to Ukraine if Congress approves a new funding package, according to a US media report on Monday.Citing two unnamed officials, NBC News said that the administration was willing to send a variant of the missiles – known as Atacms (army tactical missile systems) – if a new $60bn aid package approved by the Senate, but held up for now by congressional Republicans, becomes law.The US approved the transfer of a short-range variant of the missiles in October after Kyiv offered assurances that they would not be used to strike inside Russian-held territory. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, later said that the weapons had “proven themselves”.Newer variations of Atacms that the Biden administration wants to send to Ukraine have a maximum range of nearly 200 miles (300km), typically carrying cluster bomblets, allowing Ukrainian forces to strike the Crimean Peninsula.According to officials who spoke with NBC anonymously, it was possible that the US would request that Nato allies provide the missiles to Ukraine against the expectation that the American government would refill depleted stockpiles.Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, said in recent days that the fall of Avdiivka to Russian forces had shown that supplies of “long-range weapons are needed to destroy enemy formations”.A US state department readout ahead of a meeting between the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in Munich said it anticipated the diplomats would discuss “pressing” issues related to “ammunition, air defense, [and] long-range capabilities”.Kuleba later said he had discussed the supply of long-range Atacms with his US counterpart at a meeting on Saturday, calling the system “an important symbol” to Ukrainians who had been defending themselves from the invasion Russia launched in February 2022.“There is only one way to destroy Russian capabilities in Ukraine. It’s to hit deep into the occupied territories, bypassing Russian radio-electronic warfare and interceptors,” he said.“If you want to hit behind the lines, disrupt their logistics and supplies, destroy their depots of ammunition, you can do it only with long-range missiles,” he added.In October, after the system was used to hit helicopters at two airfields in Russian-occupied territory, Vladimir Putin called delivery of tactical ballistic missiles to Kyiv “another mistake by the United States”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Russian president claimed that delivery of the missiles would “not do Ukraine any good either. It will simply prolong [their] agony.”“War is war,” Putin said. “And, of course, I have said that [Atacms] pose a threat. It goes without saying. But what counts most is that they are completely unable to drastically change the situation along the line of contact. It’s impossible.”A spokesperson for the US defense department confirmed to NBC that as it stands, there is no funding available to send more military equipment to Ukraine.“Without a supplemental [funding bill], we do not currently have a security assistance package to give to Ukraine,” the spokesperson said. “At the same time, I won’t speculate on the contents of any future packages if a supplemental were to be passed. We will let you know if this changes and if we have a new package to announce.” More

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    Trump acknowledges Navalny’s death days later, without mentioning Putin

    Donald Trump has offered a belated acknowledgement of the purportedly sudden death of Alexei Navalny, three days after the Russian opposition leader collapsed in one of Russia’s penal colonies. But Trump failed to join with – or acknowledge – international outrage at Navalny’s political nemesis, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. The former US president and presumptive Republican White House nominee added: “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”Trump’s statement, which turned a grave global political issue into one of significance to his agenda, comes one day after Nikki Haley – his lone remaining opponent in the Republican presidential primary – criticized him for avoiding substantial comment on Navalny’s death.“Either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that Putin killed one of his political opponents – or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Haley said on Sunday on ABC News’ This Week. “Either one of those is concerning. Either one of those is a problem.”Separately, minutes before his Truth Social post about Navalny on Monday, Haley had appeared on Fox News and said: “It is amazing to me how weak in the knees [Trump] is when it comes to Putin.”“He is yet to say anything about Navalny’s death, which – Putin murdered him,” Haley said.Haley, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s presidency, joined other prominent American politicians, including Joe Biden, in condemning Putin for Navalny’s death.Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, on Monday accused Putin of killing her husband. She also accused Russian authorities of hiding his corpse and of waiting for traces of the Novichok nerve agent to disappear from his body.“I urge you to stand next to me,” Navalnaya said in comments directed to Russians generally. “I ask you to share the rage with me – rage, anger, hatred towards those who dared to kill our future.”But Trump, who frequently praised Putin during his single term in the White House, has largely elected to remain silent about Navalny’s death.Haley’s criticism of Trump’s approach to Navalny’s death comes as the former president leads her by 30 percentage points in polling ahead of the forthcoming Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, where she was once governor.At a recent campaign rally in that state, Trump claimed to have told the head of state “of a big country” while he was in the Oval Office that if the foreign leader’s nation did not meet its financial obligations to Nato, then Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” as far as Trump was concerned.The Republican US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on Sunday said that he supported Trump’s call for fair contributions to the Nato alliance. “I want to have a system where if you don’t pay, you get kicked out,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut, Graham added, “No, I’m not inviting Russia to invade Ukraine,” as it did nearly two years ago.In his statement on Navalny, Trump identified only his personal political priorities and issues, alluding to the immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border and his lies that he lost the 2020 election to Biden because of electoral fraud.He also referred to “unfair courtroom decisions” as he faces more than 90 pending criminal charges, including for subversion of the election that he lost to Biden. Trump additionally is grappling with how to pay civil judgments in excess of half a billion dollars after being adjudicated a business fraudster as well as being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.“WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” he wrote in his post about Navalny.Despite his reluctance to dwell on Navalny, polls at the moment suggests Trump enjoys a slight advantage with the American electorate over Biden. More