Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team vowed to retaliate against Russia’s expulsion of two United States diplomats as Kremlin hostility to American influence in Russia continues to complicate embassy operations in the country.
“Yet again, Russia has chosen confrontation and escalation over constructive diplomatic engagement,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday. “It continues to harass employees of our embassy just as it continues to intimidate its own citizens.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took aim at two U.S. embassy officials, Jeffrey Sillin and David Bernstein, for “liaising with a Russian citizen” who has been indicted for working for the U.S. consulate in Vladivostok. Their expulsion exacerbates the staffing feud that already has forced the U.S. embassy in Moscow to curtail operations and raised the possibility of a full embassy closure.
"The aforementioned persons conducted illegal activities by maintaining contact with Russian citizen Robert Shonov, who is accused of 'confidential cooperation' with a foreign state,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday. "The illegal activity of the U.S. diplomatic mission, including interference in the internal affairs of the host country, is unacceptable and will be resolutely suppressed."
It is common for diplomatic missions to hire local staff, but Russian officials ordered the U.S. embassy to fire all local employees in April 2021 and gave U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy a “harsh” message during a meeting Thursday while notifying her that Sillin and Bernstein must leave within seven days. Blinken’s team has denounced Russia’s treatment of Shonov as yet another example of Moscow’s crackdown on Russian civil society in recent years.
“Mr. Shonov’s only role at the time of his arrest was to compile media summaries of press items from publicly available Russian media sources,” Miller said in a May commentary on Shonov’s case. “His being targeted under the ‘confidential cooperation’ statute highlights the Russian Federation’s blatant use of increasingly repressive laws against its own citizens.”
Shonov worked for the U.S. consulate in Vladivostok “for more than 25 years,” according to Miller, who added that his most recent work was mediated “by a company contracted to provide services to U.S. Embassy in Moscow in strict compliance with Russia’s laws and regulations.” Russia’s FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, claimed that Shonov was “gathering information about the special military operation, mobilization processes in Russian regions, problems, and the assessment of their influence on protest activities of the population in the runup to the 2024 presidential election.”
Shonov faces eight years in prison. Miller derided that allegation on Thursday as a complaint about “the supposedly nefarious task of performing such activities as providing our embassy with media clips.” The case against Shonov, followed by the expulsion of Sillin and Bernstein, exacerbates a crackdown on American diplomatic operations that necessitated the closure of the Vladivostok consulate “due to critically low staffing” and has curtailed U.S. embassy operations in Moscow.
“We regret that Russia has taken this path,” Miller said Thursday. “You can certainly expect that we will respond appropriately to their actions.”
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