In the matter of a few hours on Monday, Russia lost more than a hundred
of its diplomats in the United States and Europe—the result of
coördinated expulsions in response to the poisoning, in March, of a
former spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, in the United
Kingdom. The Trump Administration will expel sixty Russian diplomatic
staff from the U.S., including from Russia’s mission to the United
Nations; it will also close the Russian consulate in Seattle.
The fact that several dozen Russian diplomats will be sent packing is
not in and of itself a great loss for the Kremlin. Such expulsions,
which were a regular feature of the Cold War, have taken on the air of
ritualized formality, and represent more symbol than substance. The loss
of Russian personnel may inflict some short-term costs on Russian
intelligence gathering, but it’s far from a top-to-bottom roundup.
More important is that Washington and fourteen European Union countries
announced the measures as a single, unified policy decision. Over the
last several years, the Kremlin’s overarching goal has been to split
alliances and weaken institutions in the West, hoping that Russia can
fracture or otherwise prove feckless multilateral bodies such as the
E.U. and NATO. As part of those aims, it would also like to weaken
diplomatic and security coöperation between the United States and
Europe. That is why the Kremlin welcomed Brexit, and why it was, at
least initially, buoyed by the election of Donald Trump, a candidate who
was hostile to exactly the sort of alliances and multilateral bodies
that the Kremlin itself wanted to upend. Putin wants to deal with states
individually, old-school Realpolitik style, thinking—perhaps
correctly—that he can play a stronger hand one-on-one, rather than
facing a united front.
The symbolism, then, comes from the synchronization of the expulsions—it
is that fact, more than the difficulty of losing this or that diplomat
abroad, that will register in Moscow. It was not entirely obvious that
the United Kingdom would be able to successfully negotiate a coördinated
policy response with a body, the European Union, that it is in the
process of leaving; nor that the Trump Administration, marked by its
capriciousness and penchant for isolationism, led by a President with a
demonstrated affinity for Putin, could be persuaded to join in. The fact
that U.S. and European officials were able to pull off this small feat
of multilateral diplomacy suggests the notion of Western security
coöperation may yet have some steam left in it. In calling the
expulsions a “provocative gesture of solidarity,” the Russian Foreign
Ministry was perhaps accidentally a bit too honest in revealing what
Moscow finds most troubling in the move.
But it is also telling that, although many E.U. governments moved to
expel Russian diplomats from their territory, almost half did
not—exactly the sort of intra-E.U. split that the Kremlin has been
hoping for and trying to foster for years. Last week, Alexis Tsipras,
the Prime Minister of Greece—which is not expelling any diplomats—gave a
squishy position on the Skripal poisoning, offering his country’s
“solidarity” with the United Kingdom, but remained noncommittal on
countermeasures, saying, “We need to investigate.” On Monday, the
center-right Austrian government, led by a party with long-standing ties
to Russia, also declined to join the expulsions. Chancellor Sebastian
Kurz has said that the nation wants to serve as a “bridge-builder
between East and West.” These policy differences are a thread on which
the Kremlin will continue to pull, and now it knows exactly where the
seams are.
Monday’s expulsions are yet another data point in a growing, rather
paradoxical reality, in which Trump as an individual continues to act
glaringly conciliatory to Putin, yet his Administration repeatedly takes
measures that are arguably more hostile to Putin than those enacted
under Obama. It was the Trump Administration, for example, that approved
the sale of anti-tank Javelin missile systems to Ukraine, earlier this
month—a weapons transfer that is anathema to Putin, and one the Obama
Administration did not authorize. And in December, 2016, Obama, in
response to Russia’s election meddling, expelled thirty-five Russian
diplomats, almost half the number named by Trump on Monday.
Moscow has surely noticed that Trump can’t bring himself to say a bad
word about Putin; but it is no less glaring that his Administration
proves, over and over again, to be quite hawkish in its Russia policy.
Whether out of hope-dies-last faith or because they know something we
don’t, Russian officials continue to try and separate Trump from just
about everyone else in Washington, holding on to the idea that Trump is
being forced to lash out against Russia by others in government. On
Monday, a Russian senator from the Foreign Affairs Committee said that
Trump authorized the expulsions only “under the strongest pressure from
the American establishment.” At this point, what else can Russian
officials say? It’s not clear they have a policy Plan B for dealing with
Trump other than to hope that, like U.S.-European relations or NATO, the
President and the foreign-policy apparatus in Washington is an
institutional relationship that can be split apart.
Russia will surely enact reciprocal measures, expelling a comparable
number of U.S. and European diplomats. It will likely close a U.S.
consulate somewhere in the country. (The Twitter account belonging to
the Russian Embassy in Washington
asked followers to vote for which U.S. consulate should be closed: St.
Petersburg, Vladivostok, or Yekaterinburg.) These impending losses to
the U.S. diplomatic corps will complicate the work of the Embassy in
Moscow, which lost seven hundred and fifty-five foreign service officers
and support staff in the last round of tit-for-tat
expulsions, in July. More unpredictable and asymmetric responses are also
possible; after the United Kingdom expelled twenty-three Russian
diplomats earlier this month, not only did the Kremlin respond in kind
but it ordered the closure of the British Council, a U.K.-run cultural
institution that funded popular exhibits, performances, and festivals
throughout Russia.
Ultimately, diplomatic expulsions are the easy and obvious policy
solution. They don’t force London and other European financial centers
to confront uncomfortable truths about the amount of Russian money
sloshing through their financial institutions and real-estate markets.
The United Kingdom, especially, is sensitive to the loss of
international capital at a time when its status as a global financial
hub is already in question because of Brexit.
That leaves demonstrative measures like Monday’s expulsions—the Kremlin
won’t like them, but it can certainly live with them. It will easily be
able to portray them as part of the West’s ingrained Russophobia. After
Putin’s essentially uncontested reëlection last week, his campaign
spokesman, Andrey Kondrashov, explicitly
addressed how Putin benefitted from tensions with the United Kingdom over Skripal.
“We must say thanks to Great Britain,” Kondrashov said, explaining how
the Kremlin met its seventy-per-cent target for voter turnout. “We were
pressured exactly at the moment when we needed to mobilize,” he said,
adding that, when Russia is accused of something on the world stage,
“the Russian people unite around the center of power. And the center of
power is certainly Putin.”
But the Russian public has little sympathy for the oligarchs and corrupt
officials who park their money in the West, and going after them would
meet with sympathy—even outright support—inside Russia itself. Imagine
the difficulty for Russia’s television propagandists in spinning to
viewers why they should be outraged that a bureaucrat lost access to his
apartment in London or villa in the South of France. Yet that would
carry a real, not just theatrical cost, for the governments carrying out
such measures. In other words, a U.S. or E.U. crackdown on illicit cash
and investments coming from Russia would be a truly significant sanction,
not just for those on the receiving end but for those enacting it—which
is exactly the reason it’s not happening.