In response to Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine, the European Union has pushed back on the Kremlin in robust language that President Vladimir Putin understands.
The EU has expelled more than 350 Russian diplomats from embassies on its soil. This represents an unprecedented move outside full-scale war. Beginning in mid-March, EU countries commenced coordinated expulsions of Russian diplomats, mostly spies, across the continent. The effort has ramped up this week in response to reports of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, prominently in the devastated Kyiv suburb of Bucha.
It’s not just Poland and the Baltics, which are congenitally anti-Moscow. Germany, too, has announced the expulsion of 40 Russian diplomats, a remarkable change given decades of Kremlin apologists dominating Berlin. Even Austria, which traditionally turns a blind eye to Russian espionage on its soil, is dispatching four Russian diplomats home because “their activities have not been in accordance with their diplomatic status,” explained Austria’s foreign ministry. There’s the rub. Many countries send intelligence officers abroad posing as “diplomats,” and they enjoy diplomatic protections. Spying is technically illegal almost everywhere, yet diplomatic cover provides a polite fiction to get the job done. Unless, that is, the host country tires of the espionage and declares the “diplomat” persona non grata, dispatching that person home. This is what’s called being “PNG’d” in the spy trade. It’s what’s happening now on a vast scale.
Some EU states want NATO countries to follow suit en bloc (most of the countries participating in this big PNG party are members of both). Eyes have focused on Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears timid about expelling Russian “diplomats,” fearing that Moscow’s expected retaliation will decimate Ottawa’s diplomatic ranks in Russia — as is likely true. Yet the United States likewise needs to get in the game now.
In some sense, Washington started this process by announcing the eviction of 12 Russian “intelligence officers” posing as diplomats from Moscow’s U.N. mission in New York, just four days after Putin unleashed his aggression against Ukraine. The Kremlin then announced its usual tit-for-tat PNGs of American diplomats from Russia because that’s how the spy war goes. Since then, however, it’s been crickets. As the EU has executed an unprecedented wave of PNGs, decimating Russian intelligence ranks in Europe, Washington has remained silent. This is particularly curious given President Joe Biden’s sharply harsh rhetoric toward his Russian counterpart, whom he has derided as a “war criminal” who “cannot remain in power.”
If the White House is serious about this, it needs to follow the EU’s lead and break down Russia’s spy network in America with aggressive expulsions. We’ve been here before. In the last week of 2016, outgoing President Barack Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and the seizure of two Russian diplomatic facilities (in New York and Maryland, both really spy bases) in retaliation for Kremlin cyberattacks on that year’s presidential election. It went further under President Donald Trump in tit-for-tat fashion. In mid-2017, after Moscow PNG’d a large cohort of American diplomats and seized two U.S. diplomatic facilities, the Trump administration shut down the Russian Consulate in San Francisco as well as two diplomatic annexes in New York and Washington. Then, in March 2018, in response to the Kremlin’s poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury with a weapons-grade nerve agent, the State Department PNG’d 60 more Russians and shut down the Russian Consulate in Seattle. Those robust actions together constituted a major blow to Russian espionage operations on American soil.
Still, there’s more to be done. Russian spy networks remain active in the U.S. thanks to the presence of Russian “diplomats” recruiting and handling them. It’s time to put an end to that. Our European allies have decided that Moscow’s diplomatic retaliation is no longer a concern because normal relations with Russia cannot be restored so long as its army remains in Ukraine and Putin rules in the Kremlin. Since the Biden administration has implied as much publicly, it needs to engage Russia more robustly in the spy war — just like Europe already is doing.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
