U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s call for broad European “sanctions against Russia” while traveling in the United States Tuesday drew a derisive response from Moscow.
“Our British counterparts have pretty high self-esteem,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, per TASS, a state-run outlet. “The country, which is leaving the EU as part of Brexit, is trying to dictate foreign policy to the EU, and now it turns out that London wants to dictate foreign policy with regard to Russia to Washington as well.”
Hunt, making his first trip to the United States since taking over from Boris Johnson as the United Kingdom’s top diplomat, called for a unified Western response to counter Russian aggression. His appeal had a particular focus on Europe, where Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to fracture the European Union’s determination to maintain anti-Russia sanctions.
“[T]he United Kingdom asks its allies to go further by calling on the European Union to ensure its sanctions against Russia are comprehensive, and that we truly stand shoulder to shoulder with the U.S.,” Hunt said during an address at the United States Institute of Peace. “That means calling out and responding to transgressions with one voice wherever and whenever they occur, from the streets of Salisbury to the heart of Crimea.”
That call comes on the heels of Putin’s weekend travel to Austria and Germany. He attended the wedding of Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, who hails from a political party with ties to Russia. The Kremlin billed that trip as a personal visit, before an official meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a famously frosty relationship with Putin but also leads a country possessed of Europe’s largest economy, including strategically significant business interests with Russia.
“A limp response to Russia’s intervention in Georgia in 2008 can only have made the 2014 annexation of Crimea more likely,” Hunt said. “Not every hostile action constitutes the crossing of a ‘red line’ and we will always need a graduated menu of responses. But the strengthening of our credibility in support of a rules-based international order must become a central goal of foreign policy.”
Lavrov and Hunt traded those jabs on the same day that a top State Department official promised that the Trump administration would impose even more sanctions on Russia if Putin’s aggression persists.
“Putin’s thesis is that the American Constitution is an experiment that will fail if challenged in the right way from within,” Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The most dangerous thing we could do is to politicize the challenge, which in itself would be a gift to Putin.”
