Russia on Thursday escalated a confrontation with Europe and the United States over the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain, saying it would expel 60 American diplomats and an unspecified number of envoys from other countries to retaliate for a mass expulsion of Russian diplomats working in the West and beyond that was ordered this week.
Furious at what it described as an anti-Russian campaign orchestrated by Washington and London, the Kremlin exceeded an equivalent response to the US and ordered the closing of the American Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city. The consulate is bigger and far more important to relations than the Russian Consulate in Seattle, which the Trump administration ordered closed on Monday as part of its expulsion decree.
The crisis over the March 4 poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter has driven tensions between the Kremlin and the West to their highest pitch in decades and forced European countries, like Germany that are usually wary of clashing with Moscow, to choose sides. Britain contends that the poison used was a signature Russian nerve agent created by Soviet-era scientists.
Voicing alarm that the East-West confrontation was spinning out of control, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres said that the crisis recalled the Cold War, only without the controls and channels of communication established before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union “to make sure things would not get out of control when tensions rise”.
The intensifying crisis has also put new pressure on President Donald Trump. He has been loath to criticise Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and, against the advice of his advisers, he avoided any mention of the March 4 nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England, when he telephoned Putin to congratulate him on his lopsided victory in Russia’s March 18 election.
Following his practice of avoiding public criticism of Russia, Trump made no mention of the expulsions during a speech Thursday afternoon in Ohio. Hours later the White House issued a muted response, calling the Kremlin actions “a further deterioration” in US-Russia relations.
Russian politicians and state-controlled media outlets have long clung to the idea that Trump is Moscow’s friend and would like to improve relations but has been pressured into taking a tough line by what they describe as America’s “deep state”, a supposed network of hidden powers hostile to Russia and often loyal to former administrations.
This resilient trust in Trump, however, has been severely undermined by the American decision to rally behind British accusations that Russia was to blame for the nerve agent attack on Sergei V. Skripal, a former military intelligence officer who spied for Britain, and his daughter, Yulia. The Russians are also angry over Washington’s role in mobilising a broad coalition of European and other countries in support of Britain.
In all, 27 countries are ejecting more than 150 Russians, including people listed by their embassies and consulates as diplomats, and military and cultural attachés. Western officials say that many of the Russians are spies and that the expulsions will hinder Russian espionage.
Britain’s national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, who was visiting Washington on Thursday as the Russian expulsion order was announced, called it a response to a powerful Western message: That for the first time the US and two dozen other nations would “act together to respond to a range of aggressive Russian behaviour”.
Wary of picking a fight with the whole of Europe, however, Russia has focused its fury on London and Washington, accusing them of strong-arming allies to endorse what it insists are unfounded accusations of Russian involvement in the attack on the Skripals.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday that it would make a “mirror” response to expulsions by Germany, France and other countries that expelled a small number of Russian diplomats, suggesting equivalent expulsions of diplomats from European countries, Australia and other nations that ordered out Russian envoys on Monday.
But, Moscow avoided denouncing those countries and instead accused US authorities of “encouraging and fomenting a slander campaign against our country”, In a statement, the ministry demanded that they “stop their reckless actions aimed at ruining bilateral relations”.
Skripal, a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who was imprisoned in Russia for selling secrets to the British, was sent to Britain in 2010 as part of a spy swap. The Skripals were found unconscious in a busy shopping area in Salisbury, where Skripal lives. He remains hospitalised in critical condition, but his daughter is showing improvement, British officials announced Thursday. British officials say that hundreds of people could have been exposed to the nerve agent used against the Skripals.
British Prime Minister Theresa May and her government contend that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with one of an extremely powerful class of nerve agents known as Novichok, developed by Soviet scientists in the 1970s and ‘80s. The British say they have solid evidence that Russia was probably behind the attack.--NYT