Russia expels diplomats in spy-poisoning quarrel
MOSCOW — Russia ordered 23 British diplomats on Saturday to leave the country within a week, escalating a diplomatic crisis after a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent on British soil.
The order came days after British Prime Minister Theresa May expelled the same number of Russian diplomats and called off high-level contacts between the two governments.
The Russians also ordered the closing of the British Council, a cultural and educational organization, in Russia, and revoked permission for the British consulate general in St. Petersburg.
The announcement came after the British ambassador, Laurie Bristow, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow Saturday morning.
In a statement, the Foreign Ministry cast Russia as the aggrieved party, asserting that Russia was acting “in response to the unfounded accusation against the Russian Federation for what happened in Salisbury.”
The Kremlin delayed its response for three days until a day before national elections on Sunday, for which President Vladimir Putin has campaigned while casting himself as a defender of Russia against Western aggression.
The spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, were found unresponsive on a park bench in the cathedral city of Salisbury, England, after being attacked on March 4. British officials said the lethal nerve agent, Novichok, had been created in the Soviet Union.
The Kremlin has flatly denied any involvement in the attack, even as state television announcers have pointedly referred to the poisoning as a warning to traitors.
The case has roiled relations between the two countries, with Britain announcing that in addition to other measures, no ministers or members of the royal family would attend the World Cup hosted by Russia this summer.
Bristow told journalists in Moscow on Saturday, “We will always do what is necessary to defend ourselves, our allies and our values against an attack of this sort.”
The diplomatic crisis, he added, “has arisen as a result of an appalling attack in the United Kingdom, the attempted murder of two people using a chemical weapon developed in Russia and not declared by Russia” with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, as is required by treaty.
The tit-for-tat expulsions were the second such episode following geopolitically related poisonings in Britain.
After the British government blamed a Russian agent for adding a lethal dose of the radioactive element polonium-210 to tea sipped by Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian Security Service officer, Britain expelled four Russian diplomats in 2007, and Russia responded in kind.