The US Embassy in Moscow has been handed a note with a list of diplomats to be deported from Russia in response to the expulsion of Russians from the diplomatic mission to the United Nations, the Russian Foreign Ministry has announced.
"On 23 March, a senior diplomat from the US diplomatic mission in Moscow summoned to the Foreign Ministry was handed a note with a list of American diplomatic staff being expelled and declared persona non grata in response to Washington's expulsion of diplomats from the Russian Permanent Mission to the UN in New York, as well as a Russian employee of the UN Secretariat," a statement posted on the ministry's website Wednesday said.
"The American side was firmly told that any hostile actions of the United States against Russia would be met with a decisive and adequate response," the statement added.
Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya announced in late February that 12 employees of the Russian mission had been ordered to leave the United States by 7 March. Before that, the State Department moved to expel Sergei Trepelkov, Russia's second-ranking diplomat in Washington. Trepelkov was expelled after Russia kicked out US Embassy second-in-command Bart Gorman in response to the expulsion of yet another Russian diplomat from Washington. The US and Russian governments have engaged in tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats going back to the crisis in Ukraine in 2014. The practice was also common during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union in the 20th century.
Commenting on the Russian expulsion notice later Wednesday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the US Embassy serves as a "locus of coordination and communication" between the two countries, and that Washington does not want to see it "closed down."
Russian-US relations hit a lowpoint unseen since the deepest depths of the Cold War last month after Moscow began a military operation in Ukraine aimed at "demilitarizing" the country. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead on the operation after weeks of escalating shelling, sniper and sabotage attacks by Ukrainian forces against the self-proclaimed Donbass republics, whose sovereignty Russia recognized on 21 February.
The fighting in Ukraine is the culmination of a security crisis which began eight years ago, when US and EU-backed political forces overthrew Ukraine's unpopular but democratically elected government and proceeded to try to drag the heavily divided nation into the West's orbit. The coup in Kiev prompted Crimean authorities to organize a referendum on the peninsula's status, and sparked a civil conflict in the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk which effectively continues to this day.