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As Germany, Sweden and Poland expel Russian diplomats in retaliation for Moscow showing their officials the door for supporting Putin’s critic Alexei Navalny, we recall the long history of tit-for-tat expulsions between the Kremlin and the West.
Britain expels 105 Soviet diplomats and officials in September 1971 after Moscow refuses to clarify the activities of 440 of its citizens in Britain. Two weeks later, Moscow expels 18 British people.
Paris expels 47 Soviet diplomats in April 1983 amid the so-called “farewell affair” involving Soviet double agent Vladimir Vetrov, who passed the identities of Soviet spies to the French.
The Caribbean island expels 49 Soviet diplomats in November 1983 shortly after the US invasion following a coup.
Moscow and London clash in six days after KGB London station chief Oleg Gordievsky defected in September 1985, with 31 officials expelled from each side.
In late 1986, the United States under Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev carried out tit-for-tat expulsions for several weeks.
In mid-September, Washington demands the departure of 25 members of the Soviet mission to the United Nations and Moscow responds by expelling five American diplomats.
A month later, Washington expels another 55 Soviet diplomats. Five are suspected of espionage and the rest are leaving as part of Washington’s decision to reduce the number of Soviet personnel in the United States.
Moscow responds by expelling five American diplomats and withdrawing all Soviet citizens from American missions in the country.
Two years later, Canada expelled or declared personae non gratae 19 Soviet personnel. Moscow takes similar action against 13 Canadian diplomats.
Just over a year after former KGB officer Vladimir Putin came to power in Moscow, Washington expels 50 Russian diplomats in March 2001, in the biggest espionage scandal since the end of the Cold War.
The move follows the arrest of Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence expert who spied for Moscow for 15 years.
Russia retaliates by expelling a similar number of Americans.
Britain expels four Russian diplomats and hits Moscow with visa restrictions in July 2007 after it refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of former Russian agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in London in 2006 with the radioactive substance. polonium-210.
Barack Obama expels 35 Russian intelligence agents after intelligence agencies accused Moscow of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, which brought Donald Trump to the White House.
Putin rules out retaliation. But when relations do not improve with Trump, the sanctions war resumes, and the two countries reduce the number of diplomats in each other’s capitals.
The poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent in England triggers a historic wave of expulsions between London and its western allies and Moscow in March 2018.
Russia denies participation, but some 300 diplomats are sent home in subsequent tit-for-tat expulsions. The United States imposes economic sanctions.
Slovakia expels three Russian diplomats in August 2020 for “a serious crime,” and local media are reporting a possible link to the murder of a Chechen rebel in a Berlin park in 2019. Moscow expels three Slovak diplomats in response.
Several days earlier, Norwegian and Austrian diplomats had been declared unwelcome in Russia after Oslo and Vienna expelled Russian diplomats for spying.
