A week after the UK expelled the Russian defence attaché, Colonel Maxim Yelovik, for being ‘an undeclared intelligence officer’, Russia predictably responded on Thursday by expelling my successor, Captain Adrian Coghill, from Moscow. He has a week to leave. Russia has also promised to retaliate to visa restrictions placed on Russian diplomats by Britain, and the to the removal of diplomatic status from buildings around London allegedly used for nefarious activities.
Using the pretext that Yelovik was an ‘undeclared intelligence officer’ sets an impossibly high bar for of future Russian military attachés in London.
Over recent decades, naval, army and air attachés have been routinely expelled by both Britain and Russia as diplomatic relations have fluctuated – most recently following the Salisbury poisonings in 2018. But this latest round of tit-for-tat expulsions is a new low. It formally ends, for now, the permanent UK military presence in Moscow that has endured some very tough times since 1941.
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