The volatile state of Russia’s relations with the outside world today, exacerbated by a nerve agent attack on a former spy living in Britain, however, makes the diplomatic climate of the Cold War look reassuring, said Ivan I. Kurilla, an expert on Russian-American relations, and recalls a period of paralyzing mistrust that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
From the Kremlin’s perspective, it is the United States that first upended previous norms, when President George W. Bush scrapped the Antiballistic Missile accord, an important Cold War-era treaty, in 2002.
Russia, Mr. Kurilla said, does not like the rules of the American-dominated order that have prevailed since then, “and wants to change them.”
One rule that Russia has consistently embraced, however, is the principle of reciprocity, and the Kremlin made clear on Monday that it would, after assessing the scale of the damage to its diplomat corps overseas, respond with expulsions of Western diplomats from Russia.
The Russian Parliament also weighed in, with the deputy head of its foreign affairs committee, Aleksei Chepa, telling the Interfax news agency that Russia would not bow to the West’s diplomatic “war.” Russia, he said, “will not allow itself to be beaten up, the harder they try to intimidate us, the tougher our response will be.”
When Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats this month in response to the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England, Moscow not only evicted an equal number of British diplomats, but ordered the closing of the British Council, an organization that promotes British culture and language.
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