As demonstrators protested outside and the State Department condemned the latest Egyptian death sentences of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy sought on April 28 to convince an elite Washington audience that Egypt is still moving toward a participatory democracy and values its relations with the United States.

But Fahmy, speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), also said that Egypt has other options, including “an emerging relationship with Russia [that] we will seek to nurture and leverage.”

The veteran Egyptian diplomat, who served as President Hosni Mubarak’s ambassador to Washington for nine years starting in 1999, is meeting with US officials at a time of considerable tension over Egyptian policies, in particular the barring of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Hours before Fahmy spoke, a provincial Egyptian judge sentenced the spiritual guide of the Brotherhood, Mohammed Badie, and 682 others, to death. At the same time, a Cairo court banned the activities of the April 6 Movement, a secular liberal group that helped instigate the revolt against Mubarak in 2011 and that has protested the wholesale crackdown on political freedoms in the country since Egypt’s only democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was ousted last summer.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki issued a statement on April 28, saying that the United States is “deeply concerned by today’s Egyptian court actions related to another mass trial and preliminary death sentences as well as the banning of the April 6 Youth Movement activities. Today’s preliminary death sentences against 683 defendants and the upholding of death sentences against 37 defendants from a March 25 decision are unconscionable.” The statement went on to urge Egyptian authorities to reverse the rulings and suspend future mass trials, asserting that the court decisions “run counter to the most basic democratic principles and foster the instability, extremism, and radicalization that Egypt’s interim government says it seeks to resolve.”