WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made John Sullivan’s powerful job as U.S. envoy to Moscow even tougher as he grapples with the Kremlin’s nuclear saber-rattling and threats to sever relations whereas retaining his embassy operating on one-tenth the traditional workers.
“It was actually unhealthy two and a half years in the past,” Sullivan remembered of his arrival in Jan. 2020. “It’s gotten worse.”
Severe workers cuts imposed by Russia’s authorities haven’t but pressured him to clear embassy bathrooms or buff flooring, as rumored in Washington, although he mentioned he is aware of how to do each.
The loquacious grandson of Irish immigrants expounded this week in an interview about being Washington’s man in Moscow 5 weeks right into a warfare through which U.S.-supplied arms are killing his host nation’s troops and sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies are devastating Russia’s financial system.
Until now, he mentioned, his conferences with Russian international ministry officers have “not been personally insulting or hostile,” nor has there been a severe backlash towards the embassy.
“The safety scenario right here is not that a lot completely different from what it was a month in the past, six months in the past,” he mentioned by way of video name from a spartan workplace overlooking an embassy courtyard dusted with recent snow. “But that might change on the discretion of the host authorities in a minute.”
Sullivan is coping with circumstances that no earlier U.S. ambassador to Russia confronted, mentioned John Herbst, a former U.S. envoy to Ukraine with the Atlantic Council assume tank. “We are really in a interval of hostile relations with Moscow.”
U.S.-Russian ties already had been at their post-Cold War iciest when former U.S. President Donald Trump tapped Sullivan for some of the troublesome jobs in U.S. diplomacy, one beforehand held by luminaries akin to John Quincy Adams and George Kennan.
The rivals had been engaged in tit-for-tat expulsions and a diplomatic visa feud, with Moscow ordering the closure of the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg in March 2018. The consulates in Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg had been shut after he arrived, leaving the embassy as the one working U.S. mission in Russia.
But its workers has shrunk from some 1,200 in 2017 to round 130, about half of them Marines and different safety guards.
The sides additionally had been at odds over points starting from Syria’s civil warfare and the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea and backing of separatists in Ukraine’s east to U.S. sanctions slapped on Russia for attempting to sway the 2016 presidential vote to Trump.
As relations deteriorated, Trump’s Democratic successor, Joe Biden, determined to retain Sullivan, an institution Republican lawyer who doesn’t converse Russian however whose affection for Russia dates to his childhood admiration of the Soviet hockey staff.
In April 2021, Washington recalled Sullivan for consultations after Russia’s envoy was summoned to Moscow.
Implementing a decree by President Vladimir Putin, the Russian authorities in May 2021 ordered the embassy to hearth scores of Russian workers who carried out vital duties. That pressured a halt to the processing of all however “life or demise” visas.
Hopes that tensions would ease rose when Sullivan and Russia’s ambassador to Washington returned to their posts in June and Biden and Putin met in Geneva the identical month.
But relations worsened. Russia massed troops on Ukraine’s borders, demanded sweeping safety ensures rejected by Washington and its NATO allies, and on Feb. 24 invaded its neighbor.
“We’re within the Mariana Trench so far as diplomatic relations go,” Sullivan mentioned, referring to Earth’s deepest ocean abyss.
Russia says it’s waging a “particular operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine. The warfare has killed 1000’s and uprooted tens of millions.
Sullivan’s challenges span the ominous to the routine.
Days after he unleashed his invasion, Putin put his nuclear forces on excessive alert, citing aggressive statements by NATO leaders and financial sanctions towards Moscow.
U.S. officers say they’re involved about veiled threats of nuclear warfare that they proceed to hear from Russian officers, together with comparisons to the 1962 Cuban missile disaster.
Sullivan mentioned he takes severely a menace “from the very prime of the Russian authorities” to sever diplomatic ties, asserting that “The Russians do not interact in rhetorical prospers.”
“The United States doesn’t need to shut its embassy right here. President Biden doesn’t need to recall me as ambassador. But that is not one thing that we essentially management,” he mentioned.
‘CROWBAR TO PRY ME OUT’
Russia expelled Sullivan’s deputy in February and just lately mentioned one other 37 U.S. staffers should go away by July. That would go away the embassy in “caretaker standing,” secured by a skeleton contingent, one U.S. official mentioned on situation of anonymity.
The embassy already has misplaced its elevator technician, that means diplomats could quickly be doing a number of atlases, and retaining the sprinkler techniques working will turn into a severe security situation if the final two electricians have to go away, the U.S. official mentioned.
An enhance in in a single day calls with Washington as tensions mounted over Russia’s army construct up prompted Sullivan in February to transfer out of Spaso House, the elegant ambassadorial residence, a 15-minute drive from the chancery and its safe communications facility.
He moved into the extra modest Townhouse One, the place his deputy lived earlier than being expelled, which is a fast stroll to the chancery, the U.S. official mentioned.
If diplomatic ties had been severed, requiring the embassy to shut, Sullivan mentioned he might not pursue one in every of his most urgent duties: advocating for detained Americans.
They embody basketball star Brittney Griner and former Marines Trevor Reed, who’s staging a second starvation strike, and Paul Whelan, in addition to an unknown variety of others.
“I’ve instructed my colleagues again house, they are going to have to use a crowbar to pry me out of right here as a result of I’m not leaving till, you recognize, till they both throw me out or the president simply says, ‘Look, you gotta come house.’
Sullivan mentioned he desires to “be right here and at a minimal to advocate for these Americans that we would go away behind iron bars.”
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Mary Milliken and Daniel Wallis)
