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As Russia Empties Embassies, Who Will Replace That Lost Passport? Trump Advisers Urge Tougher Russia Policy After Expulsions
(about 7 hours later)
MOSCOW — The scope of Russia’s retaliatory expulsions of Western diplomats grew clearer Friday as the Kremlin summoned 23 ambassadors to issue eviction orders, while diplomatic veterans questioned how the United States Embassy, with a greatly reduced staff, could perform basic tasks. WASHINGTON — Some senior Trump administration officials are pressing for more aggressive action toward Russia, hoping to persuade a reluctant President Trump to change his approach after a week of mass diplomatic expulsions that have driven the relationship with Moscow to its lowest point in decades.
The ambassadors, mostly European, called to the Kremlin Friday were told that their diplomatic staffs would be cut by the same number of people as had been lost by Russian embassies in their own capitals during a recently coordinated ouster of more than 150 Russian diplomats. With hundreds of diplomats in Washington, Moscow and European capitals packing their bags as the tensions stemming from the poisoning of a former Russian spy living in Britain have worsened, the Trump team is eyeing additional sanctions and other measures against Russia. But while aides say the president has become increasingly convinced that Russia is dangerous, he has still refused to embrace a tougher public posture himself and remains uncertain how far to authorize his administration to go.
On Thursday, Russia said it would expel 60 American diplomats. Mr. Trump has emphasized the importance of dialogue with Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, yet the departure of so many diplomats expelled from both Russia and the United States will make it that much harder to maintain a semblance of normal relations between the two countries. Cooperation in areas as varied as agriculture, counterterrorism, military affairs and space exploration could diminish, as could private travel and business dealings.
The expulsions and counter-expulsions, following the crisis over the poisoning of a former Russian spy, Sergei V. Skripal, and his daughter in England were neither the first in recent times nor the most punishing. But the cumulative impact of the cutbacks for the United States in particular left many veteran diplomats wondering how its embassy could operate. The perils of the diplomatic breakdown came into sharper relief on Friday. Russia’s ambassador in Washington lamented that no one would meet with him, and his embassy complained that Russian diplomats were being harassed by American intelligence agencies eager to recruit them.
Much of the burden is expected to fall on Washington’s new ambassador to Moscow, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who took over an embassy already struggling to function after an order by the Kremlin last summer that it dispense with 755 employees in response to sweeping American sanctions for Russia’s election meddling. The Pentagon, for its part, said that it had no notice of a test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile conducted by Russia and announced on Friday, a lack of communication that experts worry could lead to miscalculation.
The United States will still have an ambassador in Moscow after this, as will Russia in Washington, so high-level contact on potentially calamitous matters of state should continue, as it did at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when the Kennedy administration helped avert nuclear war through its contacts with the Soviet ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin. “I don’t remember such bad shape of our relations,” Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to Washington, told NBC’s “Today” show. “There is a great mistrust between the United States and Russia.”
Intelligence officers working under “official cover” as diplomats were especially targeted. But with the reduction in numbers, the wheels of basic diplomacy, involving things like visas, consular services, cultural events and simply talking to people, are grinding ever more slowly and, in some cases, coming to a halt. Since his arrival last year in Washington, Mr. Antonov said he had invited American officials to his residence only to be repeatedly rebuffed. “If they are scared, I said, ‘Come on, we can meet in a restaurant and to discuss all outstanding issues,’” he said. “It was four or five months ago. And I got answer: silent.”
“The embassy is struggling to do basic operations. This latest round will hurt. Morale, of course, is also very low,” said Michael A. McFaul, who served as ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014. American officials said a shift in the administration’s approach has been building for weeks. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose last official day on the job is Saturday, had come to the conclusion before Mr. Trump fired him this month that a year of attempting to cooperate had not yielded much success, according to people familiar with his thinking. As a result, they said, Mr. Tillerson had begun mapping out a tougher policy toward Russia and found agreement in the White House.
Even before this week’s expulsions of American diplomats, the wait for a United States visitor’s visa in Moscow was among the longest in the world. It now takes 250 days just to get an appointment with the visa section, compared with four in Beijing and 31 in New Delhi. The administration began taking a more robust approach, publicly blaming Russia for a devastating attack on computers in Ukraine and elsewhere, accusing Moscow of trying to break into the United States’ power grid and imposing sanctions in retaliation for Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
“What we call diplomacy now is an extremely complex business — it’s culture, visas, consular services, transport, business and trade,” said Stefano Stefanini, former Italian ambassador to NATO and a diplomat in Moscow and Washington. “The traditional diplomacy, the capacity to talk politics with Moscow, won’t be diminished by this tat-for-tat. But of course the workload for everyone will increase.” Mr. Tillerson’s feelings were hardened further by a conversation with Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary who described to him the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy, Sergei V. Skripal, and his daughter living in Britain. Even in the hours before his dismissal by Mr. Trump, Mr. Tillerson spoke out in stronger terms than the president in condemning the poisoning.
Kori Schake, a former Pentagon and White House official now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said that continuing diplomacy in embassies really did matter. “Most of the high policy stuff can be done in Washington,” she said. “But what does get done and is especially important in authoritarian societies like Russia is to have American diplomats out and about, supporting civil society and independent journalists and engaging personally, so that people’s experience with Americans is different from what their government tells them.” While Mr. Tillerson is on the way out, his designated successor, Mike Pompeo, and the incoming national security adviser, John R. Bolton, are both considered even more hawkish on Russia.
On Thursday morning, a few hours before the Russian foreign minister summoned Mr. Huntsman to inform him that he was losing yet more staff, the United States Embassy posted a video of Mr. Huntsman on its Twitter feed. At the same time, some officials at the Pentagon have expressed caution about the escalating conflict with Russia, citing consequences in Syria, where the United States and Russia have both conducted military operations.
“These are difficult times in the Russia-U.S. relationship,” he said, adding optimistically that “the doors to dialogue remain open.” The Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats and intelligence officers and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle this week as part of a wider international retaliation for the poisoning of Mr. Skripal. Russia responded Thursday by ordering out 60 Americans and closing the consulate in St. Petersburg. The scope of Russia’s retaliation grew clearer Friday as the Kremlin summoned 23 ambassadors from other countries to evict some of their diplomats.
The opening, however, is growing increasingly narrow, not only because relations have become so strained but because there are simply fewer and fewer people on the ground to stop the door from slamming shut. But Mr. Trump has remained publicly silent amid the dramatic rounds of diplomatic retaliation, leaving it to others to condemn Moscow. Frustrated by the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into whether his campaign cooperated with Russia in 2016, a scenario he dismissed as a “hoax,” Mr. Trump recently called Mr. Putin to congratulate him on his victory in a re-election widely dismissed as a sham.
Many of the tasks that occupied the time of diplomats in the past, said Jeremy Shapiro, a former United States diplomat now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “can proceed without having an embassy. That’s modern life. You don’t need an embassy to do banking across borders or trade.” Mr. Trump made no mention of the poisoning of Mr. Skripal during the call but instead suggested that he wanted to schedule a summit meeting with the Russian president.
But, he added, you do need a functioning embassy to issue visas and provide consular services to Americans abroad, who lose passports, get mugged or end up drunk or in hospitals. “It’s not diplomacy, but it’s super-important,” he said. Both countries still have ambassadors in place, so high-level contact on potentially calamitous matters should continue, as it did at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. But the wheels of basic diplomacy, involving visas, consular services, cultural events and simply talking to people, are grinding ever more slowly and, in some cases, coming to a halt.
Ejecting diplomats and closing consulates, as the United States has been ordered to do in St. Petersburg, “makes it harder for Russians to come to America and vice versa,” Mr. Shapiro said. It might not be diplomacy in the tradition of Henry A. Kissinger, he said, but it provides “the fine lines of the relationship.” “The parties lose some of their eyes and ears, so the quality of the reporting goes down,” said Charles A. Kupchan, who was Europe director of the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. “It’s not just intelligence but day-to-day political and economic reporting: What’s the buzz in the street, what do interlocutors say? And consular services do get hit.”
Charles A. Kupchan, who was Europe director of the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, said that “expulsions carry greater symbolic weight than substantive weight — diplomacy will go on even though Russians have fewer diplomats in the U.S. and Americans and Europeans fewer in Russia.” The expulsions left many diplomats wondering how the American Embassy in Moscow could operate. Much of the burden will fall on the ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who took over an embassy already struggling to function after an order by the Kremlin last summer that it dispense with 755 employees in response to sweeping American sanctions for Russia’s election meddling.
But there are tangible costs, he said. “The parties lose some of their eyes and ears, so the quality of the reporting goes down. It’s not just intelligence but day-to day political and economic reporting: What’s the buzz in the street, what do interlocutors say. And consular services do get hit.” “The embassy is struggling to do basic operations. This latest round will hurt,” said Michael A. McFaul, who served as ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014. “Morale, of course, is also very low.”
Russia’s order on Thursday that Washington close its consulate in St. Petersburg, by far the biggest of three American consulates in Russia, will throw more sand in the machinery of diplomacy as it is really practiced. It will also leave Washington without eyes and ears in Russia’s second most populous city and its principal gateway to the West. Even before this week’s expulsions, the wait in Moscow to obtain a visitor’s visa to the United States was among the longest in the world. It now takes 250 days just to get an appointment with the visa section, compared with four in Beijing and 31 in New Delhi.
Russia wants the consulate shut in retaliation for Washington’s demand earlier in the week that Moscow close its own consulate in Seattle, which was seen as a nest of spies gathering secrets from Boeing and a nearby naval base, not to speak of the area’s high-tech firms. An American spokesman told Russian news media this week that the embassy had been placed under “significant constraints” by the Foreign Ministry and “could not accommodate all their many requests at all times, particularly for large groups.”
The United States mission in St. Petersburg is unlikely to have been a haven for espionage: It was notoriously insecure. With walls connected to Russian-occupied buildings on both sides, it is an unclassified operation without Marine guards or a National Security Agency station, said a former American diplomat who worked there during the Cold War. Washington has been asking for a new location for years. Simon Schuchat, a former diplomat at the embassy in the Moscow, recalled how haphazard and unnerving it is when Russia began the process of ousting alleged spies during a round of expulsions in 2001. Inevitably, Moscow ordered out diplomats unconnected to espionage.
Simon Schuchat, a former diplomat in the Moscow embassy’s economics section, recalled how haphazard and unnerving the process of Russia weeding out alleged spies was during a round of expulsions in 2001. Inevitably, Moscow ordered out diplomats who had no connection to espionage. “They tended to go for people with better language skills,” Mr. Schuchat said, adding that they “missed many spies and included many non-spies.”
“They tended to go for people with better language skills,” Mr. Schuchat said, adding that they “missed many spies and included many non-spies. We had a week or so waiting for the list to be issued.” This time around, intelligence officers working under “official cover” as diplomats were especially targeted but some American officials downplayed the impact, saying the United States still came out ahead in the expulsions.
The Russians, he said, also took care not to expel diplomats “from sections they thought were useful for them,” and left intact a large NASA presence. “That’s to our benefit,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said at a seminar on Thursday in Austin, Tex. “There are a lot more Russians in America than Americans in Russia in the intelligence agencies.”
One possible silver lining in the latest ruckus is that relations have deteriorated so much in recent years that American diplomats in Moscow have fewer tasks than they did; a once-sprawling canvas of diplomatic and other business ties between Russia and the United States has withered since President Vladimir V. Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012 after a four-year stint as prime minister. On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused the agencies overseen by Mr. Coats of exploiting the situation by approaching Russian diplomats leaving the United States to offer “assistance” in exchange for “entering into covert relations” on behalf of the American government.
The embassy’s workload was slashed by a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans — cutting the workload of consular officials handling immigrant visas — and a bar on American development workers with the United States Agency for International Development operating in Russia. “The ploy is not working,” the ministry said in a statement, “but their behavior is cynical and distasteful, as if Washington has stepped completely beyond the bounds of common decency.”
A near halt to once regular congressional junkets has also saved embassy staff from having to give briefings, arrange meetings and host cocktail parties.
All the same, there are still plenty of matters, like counterterrorism, space exploration and drug control, on which Moscow and Washington sometimes collaborate. The Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration, NASA and the Department of Agriculture all have officials in the Moscow embassy.
Information Moscow, a handbook of foreign entities operating in Moscow, lists 108 accredited American diplomats, but the total number of Americans working at the embassy has been much higher.
The last publicly available detailed breakdown, contained in a 2013 report on the Moscow mission by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General, put the total number of direct-hire American staff at the embassy at 289, alongside 867 foreign staff, mostly Russians working as drivers, guards and in administration and other support jobs.
Most of the Russians have now gone, axed last July on an order from Mr. Putin in retaliation for sweeping sanctions imposed by Congress. Their departure put such a strain on the embassy that it suspended for a time one of its most basic functions, the processing of visas.
Visas are now again issued, but so slowly that they have become yet another point of friction between the two countries, instead of a way to narrow the gulf that separates them.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, recently accused Washington of “playing dirty” by stalling on visas for a Russian wrestling team that had hoped to compete in a tournament in Iowa City.
Their inability to get visas, she said, was “extremely outrageous.” She said the American embassy had told the Foreign Ministry that it could not process the wrestlers’ visas because of staff cuts demanded by Russia, which she called an excuse to keep Russians out of a world championship.
An American embassy spokesman declined to comment on why the visas had not been granted but told Russian media this week that the embassy had been placed under “significant constraints” by the Foreign Ministry and “could not accommodate all their many requests at all times, particularly for large groups.”
Such niggling issues, while not involving war and peace, highlight just how even routine matters normally handled easily by an embassy have become fuel for mutual recrimination and a climate of hostility.