Harassment of American diplomats in Moscow are growing. Intruders brake into their houses, the security service follow their families, police stop their cars dozen of times. And one diplomat had a shoulder broken by a security guard at the entrance of the embassy.
“The widely reported harassment is another front in the ‘gray war’ in which Russia has been engaged with Europe since the return of Putin”, the US ambassador in Prague, Norm Eisen, said. “Now it’s in retaliation for Western sanctions because of Ukraine. They are hitting American diplomats literally where they live”.
Eisen’s words are not exaggerated. Josh Rogin, a commentator for the Washington Post and expert in foreign policy and national security, has collected a series of first-hand testimony from current and former U.S. diplomats in Russia. In a series of classified cables, officials report intrusions into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, or open taps. One diplomat reported that he found human excrements on his living room carpet.
Harassment of diplomats
But the most serious incident happened on June 6, when one U.S. official was tackled and left with a broken shoulder by a policeman outside the embassy in Moscow while showing him his badge. “It was definitely intentional”, the official told Radio Free Europe, adding that there was not even any apparent reason.
The escalation was such that, on June 27, Secretary of State John Kerry complained about it directly with Vladimir Putin. “We take it very seriously,” Kerry’s spokeswoman, Elizabeth Trudeau, said.
Putin reportedly didn’t comment on the possibility of intervening. On the other hand, it’s quite difficult to imagine there’s not a deliberate order from the Kremlin to make American diplomats nervous. After all, the guards monitoring the U.S. embassy in Moscow work for the FSB, Putin’s intelligence.
The Russian authorities not only did not deny their responsibility for the actions that – it should be remembered – are often perpetrated by unknown persons, but even implicitly confirmed the American accusations.
The Russian embassy in Washington released a statement saying that “The deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations, was not caused by us, but rather by the current Administrations’ policy of sanctions. The Russian side has never acted proactively to negatively affect U.S. diplomats in any way”.
The Russian Foreign Minister’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, was even more explicit. “Diplomacy is based on reciprocity. The more the U.S. damages relations, the harder it will be for U.S. diplomats to work in Russia”, she said on June 28th.
In retaliation for sanctions
Last January, Washington removed five of the six Russian honorary consuls in the country. And perhaps this is what Zakharova means when she talks of reciprocity. Also because no Russian diplomat in the U.S. has so far complained of any harassment.
Small acts of intimidation against diplomats from not-so-fiend or even hostile countries are quite common. And Russia has never made any exception. Officials are, for example, quite accustomed to having their families followed by the secret services in the full light of day. But the level reached by the new behavior is much more serious and worrying.
The only precedent of a certain gravity, probably, has been reported by the U.S. defense attaché in Moscow in the first term of the Obama administration, when unknown persons broke into his house and killed his dog.
The Russian secret service “gray war” on American diplomats is another line of confrontation between Moscow and the West. There are no direct reports of similar incidents against officials of other countries, although Trudeau said that other western embassies had reported the same behavior toward their diplomats in Moscow. One more sign, if ever needed, that sanctions are anything but indifferent to Putin’s Russia.
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Harassment of American diplomats in Moscow are growing. Intruders brake into their houses, the security service follow their families, police stop their cars dozen of times. And one diplomat had a shoulder broken by a security guard at the entrance of the embassy.
