Russians kick out hundreds of US diplomats
TENSIONS deepened between Russia and the US last night when the Kremlin ordered hundreds of American diplomats out of the country.
Moscow was retaliating after Washington voted to strengthen sanctions.
The Putin regime also seized two American diplomatic properties as it responded to a US Senate vote for new financial penalties on Russia over its alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election, annexation of Crimea and military operations in eastern Ukraine.
Donald Trump is seeking closer relations with Moscow but risks antagonising fellow Republicans in the Senate if he vetoes the sanctions. The Russian foreign ministry said it had asked the US embassy to cut its diplomatic and technical staff to no more than 455 by September 1.
The figure is the same as the number of Russian diplomats left in America after Washington expelled 35 of them last December.
The order affects not only the embassy in Moscow but also consulates in St Petersburg and two other cities. Officials would not confirm exactly how many US staff will
‘Disappointment and protest’
be affected but government sources said about 1,100 work for its Russian embassy, including 300 Americans.
The Kremlin has also stopped the remaining US staff from using a storage facility in Moscow and an attractive riverside country house, or dacha, where diplomats often hold barbecues and walk their dogs.
It came after the Obama administration seized two Russian diplomatic estates – one in New York’s Long Island and the other in Maryland – when it expelled the diplomats in December.
The Russian foreign ministry warned it ‘ reserves the right to carry out ... measures that could affect the interests of the US’.
John Tefft, the US ambassador in Moscow, expressed his ‘strong disappointment and protest’ over the Kremlin retaliation. The sanctions are aimed at hitting Putin and oligarchs close to the Kremlin. They will target Russian corruption, human rights abusers and keys sectors of the Russian economy, such as oil and gas exports, and weapons sales.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday said he had offered an olive branch to US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
In a phone call to Mr Tillerson, he said Russia was ready to normalise relations with the US and co- operate on global issues. The pair ‘agreed to maintain contact on a range of bilateral issues’, said the Kremlin.
However, Mr Trump looks increasingly isolated in his friendliness towards Moscow as both Republican-controlled houses of Congress passed the sanctions legislation almost unanimously.
After Mr Trump had campaigned on a pledge to improve ties with Russia, the White House had lobbied against the new sanctions. Although it has not indicated whether the president will veto them, Congress could still override such a move.
White House attempts to get on better with Moscow have been hampered by a string of official investigations into claims that Russia not only interfered in the election but may have colluded with members of the Trump campaign to damage Hillary Clinton.
DONALD Trump’s new communications director has exposed a vicious White House civil war in an expletive-ridden attack on top colleagues.
Anthony Scaramucci delivered an astonishing attack on two of the most senior figures in the Trump administration in a phone call to a journalist.
Pressing the reporter for his source on a story, he said he wanted to ‘f****** kill’ everyone in the administration who was leaking information to the media.
The former Wall Street banker called White House chief-of-staff Reince Priebus a ‘ f****** paranoid schizophrenic’, and said that he would be ‘ asked to resign very shortly’.
And turning his ire on Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, he ranted: ‘I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to **** my own ****. I’m not trying to build my brand off the f****** strength of the president.’
Mr Scaramucci has only been the President’s chief spin doctor for a week.
He has also taken over the role left empty following last week’s resignation of Press secretary Sean Spicer – who quit in protest at Mr Scaramucci’s appointment.
He made his jaw- dropping remarks to Ryan Lizza, a journalist for the New Yorker. He reportedly made no attempt to insist they were ‘off the record’.
Mr Scaramucci had phoned Lizza on Thursday to find out who had told him that Mr Scaramucci – a millionaire investment adviser – had just dined at the White House with the President and senior journalists from the Rightwing Fox News channel.
‘Who leaked that to you?’, he demanded – before blaming Mr Priebus and threatening to get him sacked. ‘Reince Priebus – if you want to leak something – he’ll be asked to resign very shortly,’ he said. When Lizza still refused to reveal his source, Mr Scaramucci threatened to sack his entire White House communications team, saying: ‘OK, I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.
‘What I want to do is I want to f****** kill all the leakers.’
President Trump has repeatedly railed against the stream of embarrassing leaks from his White House staff and has turned to the reliably loyal Mr Scaramucci.
The communications director declined to apologise for his X-rated remarks, although he admitted on Twitter that ‘I sometimes use colourful language’ and promised to refrain in future.
He later added: ‘I made a mistake in trusting in a reporter. It won’t happen again.’
The White House defended Mr Scaramucci’s vulgar rant, with a spokesman saying: ‘Sometimes he’s a passionate guy, sometimes he might let that passion get the better of him.
‘He used some colourful language that I don’t anticipate he will again.’
‘I’m going to kill all the leakers’