Putin fires back at U.S.
Russia responds to sanctions with order to slash 755 on diplomatic staff
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin announced Sunday that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Russia must reduce its staff by 755 employees, an aggressive response to the new U.S. sanctions that seemed ripped right from the Cold War playbook and sure to increase tensions between the two capitals.
In making the announcement, Putin said that Russia had shown restraint for long enough and that the staff reduction was meant to cause real discomfort for Washington and its representatives in Moscow.
“Over 1,000 employees — diplomats and technical workers — worked and continue to work today in Russia; 755 will have to stop this activity,” he said in an interview on state-run Rossiya 1 television, which published a Russian-language transcript on its website.
“That is biting,” Putin said.
The measures were the harshest such diplomatic move since a similar rupture in 1986, in the waning days of the Soviet Union.
It was also a major reversal from just the beginning of this month, when Putin first met with President Donald Trump at the G-20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany. The Kremlin had anticipated that face-to-face meeting of two presidents would be the start of the improved ties Trump talked about during his campaign, and the initial assessment in Moscow was that the two leaders had set the stage for
better relations.
But Putin said Sunday that Russia had run out of patience waiting for relations with the United States to improve.
“We waited for quite a long time that, perhaps, something will change for the better; we held out hope that the situation would somehow change,” Putin said in the interview. “But, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon.”
‘Uncalled for act’
The initial response from Washington was muted.
“This is a regrettable and uncalled for act,” the State Department said in a statement. “We are assessing the impact of such a limitation and how we will respond to it.”
Although the reduction in U.S. diplomatic staff had been announced on Friday, in response to a law passed in Congress last week expanding sanctions against Russia, Putin’s statement was the first to confirm the large number of embassy personnel involved.
Congress passed the new sanctions to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, including releasing hacked emails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Relations with Russia have been in a downward spiral, and Congress is also investigating the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., recently confirming that he met with a Russian lawyer linked to the government who wanted to discuss removing an earlier round of sanctions.
Putin has denied any Russian interference in the U.S. election, saying that anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S. was being used to drive an internal political battle.
He said it was important not to let actions like the new sanctions go unanswered.
Despite the sweeping size of the reduction, ordered to take effect by Sept. 1, it seemed that Putin had not entirely abandoned the idea of better ties with Trump.
Response to Congress
Analysts noted that diplomatic reductions are one of the simplest countermeasures possible. And in making the announcement, Putin noted at length areas where the U.S. could continue or expand their cooperation including space rockets, de-escalating the war in Syria and the long history of shared oil projects.
“It is the least painful response that Russia could have come up with,” said Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst and columnist. “You can scale them up and scale them down.”
Analysts also considered the timing of Putin’s action important, coming after Congress adopted expanded sanctions but before Trump signed them into law, as the White House has indicated he will do.
The Russian measures were announced at the most “convenient” moment, Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Facebook, “immediately after Congress voted in favor of new sanctions but before Trump could sign off on them.” So it looks like a response to Congress and not Trump, he wrote.
Russia does have additional options to pressure U.S. interests, Putin warned, without going into details. “I hope it will not come to this,” he said.
The bulk of the 755 dismissed are likely to be Russian employees of the embassy in Moscow, as well from the U.S. consulates in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has declined to specify the number of people on its payroll in Russia, and the Russian Foreign Ministry also would not say how it arrived at its count, but the numbers seemed to indicate that there are around 1,200 people employed.
It is not clear how many Americans could be expelled, if any.
‘Enormous inconvenience’
Unlike Russian diplomatic missions in the U.S., which tend not to hire Americans, the U.S. employs hundreds of Russians at the embassy who do tasks like translation, processing visa applications, cooking and driving.
“They will have to fire the Russian citizens,” Frolov said. “It will create an enormous inconvenience for the U.S. mission here, essentially slowing down the work but not affecting its core functions.”