On Sept. 3, 2020, Reuters reported that in response to the Aug. 20, 2020, poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny using Novichok, the military nerve agent developed during the Cold War by the former Soviet Union, the chair of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee Norbert Roettgen stated:

“We must pursue hard politics, we must respond with the only language (Vladimir) Putin understands – that is gas sales.”

Being hit where it hurts such as through gas sales is the only language that the Russian president truly understands and Western leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, should communicate with him using this language in order to pressure Russia to meet its international commitments and obligations.

The vicious poisoning of  Navalny with the same military nerve agent that was used on European soil in 2018 against a former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal should serve as another wake-up call. The Kremlin is resorting to hybrid warfare, including state-sponsored terrorism, to silence its opponents wherever they may be and warn everyone else of its far‑reaching and dangerous criminal arsenal.

Russia’s lethal hybrid aggression is either target-specific, as with the Skripals and Alexei Navalny, or broad in scope, as in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia, as well as Crimea and parts of the Donbas in Ukraine.

In all these cases, Russia is demonstrating total disdain regarding its international commitments.

A blatant example occurred on July 27 2020 in eastern Ukraine when Russia violated another ceasefire agreement concluded at a meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group on the very day that it took effect. Since then, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine reported that, as of Aug. 30, 2020, there have been 828 additional cease-fire violations.

Russia’s violations in Ukraine these last six years resulted in over 13,000 individuals killed and over 30,000 injured in the Donbas, and over 1.5 million persons currently internally displaced in Ukraine.

The international community can either wait for another international Russian terrorist attack or military aggression, such as in Belarus, in order to react or it can try preventing them by advising Putin – in the only language he truly understands – that Russia’s nerve agent, Novichok, has dealt a fatal blow to Nord Stream 2.

Eugene Czolij is president of Ukraine-2050, a non-profit organization established to help implement within one generation – by 2050 – strategies for the sustainable development of Ukraine as a fully independent, territorially integral, democratic, reformed and economically competitive European state.