60 Russian diplomats expelled from US arrive in Moscow
The 60 Russian diplomats who were expelled from the United States over a diplomatic standoff between Russia and Britain have arrived in Moscow.
Russian television showed images Sunday of the arrival of the diplomats at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. Buses waited to pick the diplomats and their family members up. The passengers, a total of 171 people, were from Washington and New York where they had been working and staying.
Washington expelled the diplomats after Britain accused Russia of having a hand in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former spy, and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury on March 4. The pair was reportedly poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent but Moscow has vehemently denied any involvement.
A total of 150 Russian diplomats have been expelled from various Western countries, most of them from Britain and the US. Other countries include France, Germany, Canada and Poland, Australia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Finland, Lithuania and Norway. Russia has responded by exactly cutting back the number of diplomats on Russian soil from those countries while also closing down the US consulate in Saint Petersburg in reaction to Washington’s decision to shut down Russian consulate in Seattle.
Russia even went further in its tit-for-tat actions and asked the British ambassador Laurie Bristow Saturday to cut within a month the number of diplomatic staff in Russia to the same number Russia has in Britain.
Russian embassy late on Saturday also urged Russians planning to travel to the United Kingdom to think twice, warning that they might become subject to harassment by local authorities. The embassy said the warning was because of “the anti-Russian policies and an escalation of the British side’s threatening rhetoric.”
London admitted on Saturday that border authorities had carried out checks on an incoming Aeroflot plane as part of normal and routine border procedure. Russian authorities had designated the move, which was done against the will of Russian plane’s crew and pilot, as an act of “blatant provocation.”
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