Envoy says US-Russia ties went from bad to worse and now in ‘Mariana Trench’
- US envoy to Russia John Sullivan, who is keeping the mission running on one-tenth the normal staff, said officials have ‘not been hostile’ but that could change any time
- US-Russian relations, which were at their post-Cold War iciest even before the Ukraine war, have reached an intractable stage as Moscow threatens to close the embassy
“It was really bad two and a half years ago,” Sullivan remembered of his arrival in January 2020. “It’s got worse.”
Severe staff cuts imposed by Russia’s government have not yet forced him to clean embassy toilets or buff floors, as rumoured in Washington, though he said he knows how to do both.
The loquacious grandson of Irish immigrants expounded this week in an interview about being Washington’s man in Moscow five weeks into a war in which US-supplied arms are killing his host nation’s troops and sanctions imposed by Washington and its allies are devastating Russia’s economy.
Until now, he said, his meetings with Russian foreign ministry officials have “not been personally insulting or hostile,” nor has there been a serious backlash against the embassy.
“The security situation here isn’t that much different from what it was a month ago, six months ago,” he said via video call from a spartan office overlooking an embassy courtyard dusted with fresh snow. “But that could change at the discretion of the host government in a minute.”