Russian vilification of President Obama is reaching renewed heights after the president on Thursday ordered a sweeping package of sanctions and the expulsion of 35 Russian officials from the United States, amid mounting allegations of Kremlin-led efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
The Kremlin will not reciprocate the diplomatic expulsion, Russian president Vladimir Putin said Friday, and will instead wait for President-elect Donald Trump to assume office. Trump, who has dismissed allegations of Russian cyber attacks and shown a willingness to warm relations with the Kremlin, praised Putin’s decision.
Russian officials, meanwhile, have escalated their rhetoric against Obama, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova describing the outgoing administration as “a group of foreign policy losers, embittered and shortsighted.”
Other officials condemned the retaliatory measures as a Grinch-like move meant to ruin the holidays by booting families from their vacation cottages. The Soviet-era New York and Maryland compounds that Obama ordered shuttered were being used for “intelligence-related purposes,” according to administration officials.
“I think this is quite scandalous that they chose to go after our children. They know that these cottages … are vacation facilities for our kids,” said Russian ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin. “This is Christmas time, vacation in our schools.”
“To block our access to them just as the holidays are starting, it’s cynical, from my point of view,” he added.
“I think Barack Husseinovich Obama hasn’t watched the film ‘Bad Santa,’ because what he is trying to do now is to ruin the holidays for a huge number of people,” said Sergei Zheleznyak, international secretary for Putin’s United Russia party.
Zheleznyak joined a range of other Russian officials and experts in arguing that Obama is trying to make matters difficult for the president-elect, who has promised friendlier relations with the Kremlin.
“[Obama] is at the last moment attempting to hurt relations with Russia to the maximum extent so that the next administration finds it more difficult to … restore relations,” he said.
Alexander Grishin, a journalist at the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, also said the administration’s moves were meant to hurt Trump.
“[Obama has shown an] obsessive desire to sour relations with Russia and to do everything so that Trump, after taking office, is in a maximally difficult situation,” Grishin wrote after Putin’s remarks Friday.
Putin made clear in those remarks that he will no longer deal with the current administration, Grishin added.
“Obama and his decisions no longer exist to Russia. Moscow does not pay attention to, as Dmitri Medvedev put it, the ‘anti-Russian agony’ of the outgoing administration,” he wrote. “We are determined to talk to Trump, we see through Obama, as people in the metro see through fake professional beggars.”
Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a foreign-policy group that advises the Kremlin, also said that Obama is trying to create problems for Trump.
“The goal is clear: Trump has announced that he will review the majority of Obama’s policies, including on Russia. For that reason, Obama decided to make this review as difficult as possible,” Lukyanov told BBC.
The administration announced Thursday that it would expel 35 Russian government officials suspected of working as spies from the United States after harassment of American diplomats. In relation to the intelligence community’s conclusion on Russian cyber activity, the administration sanctioned five Russian entities, including two intelligence services, as well as four Russian individuals, and shuttered two compounds.
Prominent Republican lawmakers have offered measured praise for the actions and promised to go further in the coming year.
“The retaliatory measures announced by the Obama administration today are long overdue,” Arizona senator John McCain and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said in a joint statement. “But ultimately, they are a small price for Russia to pay for its brazen attack on American democracy. We intend to lead the effort in the new Congress to impose stronger sanctions on Russia.”
