Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to intimidate President Biden into suspending his new sanctions against Russia.
The Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry announced on Wednesday that it is recalling its ambassador for consultations. Consultation recalls are a diplomatic measure used to express displeasure with a host nation’s action.
Russia’s current ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, is a hawkish ally to Putin’s national security establishment. An ultraloyalist, Antonov has connections to the GRU military intelligence service and experience with various weapons of mass destruction programs. His recall is Moscow’s way of warning the Biden administration over its imposition this week of further sanctions and export restrictions. Announcing the recall, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “For us, the main thing is to determine the ways of rectifying the Russian-American ties. … We are interested in preventing their irreversible degradation, if the Americans are aware of the associated risks.”
This reference to “associated risks” is a thinly veiled Russian threat of escalation against American interests beyond the explicit diplomatic sphere. It sits alongside similar recent threats that the United States has decided to “play with fire” and faces asymmetric Kremlin countermeasures.
Moscow’s particular concern is the Biden administration’s steady imposition of new sanctions in response to its use of chemical weapons and its cyber-espionage activities. Biden took things further on Wednesday, warning that Putin would “pay a price” for his November 2020 election interference.
Yet Putin must judge his impulse for retaliation against the risks of overreacting.
He will not want to jeopardize the Biden administration’s stance on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline to Europe, for example. Biden appears willing to allow that pipeline to be completed without imposing sanctions of the kind pledged by the Trump administration. But if Putin pushes too hard against the U.S., he risks pushing Biden toward killing off that pipeline. Were the U.S. to gut the pipeline’s enabling corporate providers with sanctions, Moscow would suffer a critical blow to its 21st-century strategy to secure Europe’s energy dependence. Moscow intends to use that dependence to extract European political acquiescence to its more destabilizing activities.
This context means that, alongside this public recall, the most likely Russian reaction will be the harassment of U.S. diplomats in Moscow. The Obama administration and, to a degree, the Trump administration were willing to turn blind eyes to these intimidation tactics.
Of course, with Putin, anything is possible.
