Putin orders U.S. to cut diplomatic staff
Sweeping reduction comes as Congress waits for Trump to sign sanctions bill.
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 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 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 an interview on state-run Rossiya 1 television, which published a Russian-language transcript on its website. “But, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon.”
Putin said 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. “That is biting,” Putin added. 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 shift in tone from the beginning of this month, when Putin first met with President Donald Trump at the G-20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany. Trump had talked during his campaign of improving ties with Russia, praising Putin, and the Kremlin had anticipated that the face-toface meeting of two presidents would be the start of a new era. The assessment in Moscow was that the two leaders had set the stage for better relations.
But then, in quick succession, came the expanded sanctions passed by Congress, Trump’s indication that he would sign them into law and Moscow’s forceful retaliation.
Washington’s response on Sunday 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.”
Congress passed the new sanctions to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, including releasing hacked emails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Congress is also investigating the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, with Trump’s eldest son, Donald J. 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 United States was being used to drive an internal political battle.
He said it was important not to let actions like the new sanctions go unanswered.
Although the reduction in U.S. diplomatic staff had been announced Friday, Putin’s statement on Sunday was the first to confirm the large number of embassy personnel involved.
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.
Analysts noted that diplomatic reductions are among the simplest countermeasures possible. And in making the announcement, Putin noted at length areas where the United States 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.
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 dismissed are likely to be Russian employees of the embassy in Moscow, as well from the consulates in St. Petersburg and Vladivostok.