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| Reuters photo |
The United States said on Monday it would expel 60 Russian diplomats, joining governments across Europe in punishing the Kremlin for a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain that they have blamed on Moscow.
It was the strongest action that U.S. President Donald Trump had taken against Russia since coming to office. He has been criticized by Democrats and members of his own Republican Party for failing to be tough enough on Russia over U.S. allegations of Russian meddling in the U.S. electoral system including the 2016 presidential campaign.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, welcoming the show of solidarity, said 18 countries had announced plans to expel Russian officials. Those included 14 European Union countries. In total, 100 Russian diplomats were being removed, the biggest Western expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Twitter that Mondayโs โextraordinary international response by our allies stands in history as the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers ever and will help defend our shared security.โ
May said the coordinated measures sent the โstrongest signal to Russia that it cannot continue to flout international law.โ
Britain had evidence Russia has investigated ways of distributing nerve agents for assassinations, May told parliament.
Russiaโs Foreign Ministry called the expulsions a โprovocative gesture.โ The Kremlin spokesman said the West was making a โmistakeโ and that President Vladimir Putin would make a final decision about Russiaโs response.
Moscow has denied being behind the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the southern English city of Salisbury. Skripal, 66, and Yulia Skripal, 33, were found unconscious on a public bench in a shopping center on March 4 and remain critically ill in hospital.
โWe assess that more than 130 people in Salisbury could have been potentially exposed to this nerve agent,โ May said.
Mondayโs wave of expulsions followed EU leaders saying last week that evidence presented by May of Russian involvement in the attack was a solid basis for further action.
The staff expelled by Washington includes 12 people identified by the United States as intelligence officers from Russiaโs mission to the United Nations headquarters in New York. They were involved in activities outside their official capacity and an abuse of their privileges of residence, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said.
Russian U.N. ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called it โa very unfortunate, very unfriendly move.โ
Trump also ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle because of its proximity to a U.S. submarine base and planemaker and defense contractor Boeing Co, a senior U.S. official said. Seattle was a hub of Russian cyber espionage, both political and commercial, according to two U.S. intelligence officials.
The administration officials said โwell over 100 intelligence officersโ operated in the United States, and Washingtonโs action cuts 60 of them.
ONE WEEK TO LEAVE
The envoys and their families have been given a week to leave the United States, according to one U.S. official.
Trump, who before he took office in January last year promised warmer ties with Putin, last week congratulated the Russian leader on his re-election, drawing criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike. Trump said the two leaders had made tentative plans to meet in the โnot too distant future.โ
He did not bring up the poisoning attack in his phone call with Putin.
Trump himself was silent on Monday on Twitter, where he often comments about his policy decisions. But the White House later said it would like to have a โcooperative relationshipโ with Russia.
โThe president wants to work with the Russians but their actions sometimes donโt allow that to happen,โ White House spokesman Raj Shah told a news briefing. โThe poisoning in the U.K. that has kind of led to todayโs announcement was a very brazen action. It was a reckless action.โ
U.S. lawmakers largely welcomed Trumpโs move on Monday.
Washington had already imposed sanctions on Russian citizens and firms for U.S. election meddling and cyber attacks but put off targeting oligarchs and government officials close to Putin.
โPunishing diplomats is not a direct threat to Putinโs power or money. Further, our previous efforts to kick out diplomats has done little to change Kremlin behavior,โ said former CIA officer John Sipher, who served in Moscow and ran the agencyโs Russia operations.
U.S. officials said the scale of the expulsions was based not only on the expansion of Russian espionage in the United States, but also on its increasing focus on critical infrastructure targets such as electrical grids, financial networks, transportation and healthcare.
Trump has been criticized in the United States for doing too little to punish Russia for the election meddling and other actions, and U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into whether Trumpโs campaign colluded with the Russians, something he denies. Moscow denies interference in the campaign.
