In retaliation for the wave of new sanctions the United States Congress passed, Moscow has ordered the U.S. cut 755 diplomatic staff by September. The demand will likely end up hitting local Russian staff particularly hard, given they vastly outnumber the American embassy and consulate personnel in Russia. President Donald Trump has not yet signed the sanctions bill, although he is expected to do so, or responded to Moscow’s retaliatory actions.
The Cipher Brief’s Mackenzie Weinger spoke with Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution, a retired Foreign Service officer who spent more than 25 years with the State Department, including as Ambassador to Ukraine, and Alexander "Sandy" Vershbow of the Atlantic Council, a former Ambassador to Russia from 2001-2005, about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call to significantly cut the number of U.S. embassy personnel.
Pifer also offered his first-hand perspective on what the cuts could mean for diplomatic services given his time as a Foreign Service officer in Moscow in 1986 when the Soviet Union pulled all local employees from working for the U.S. embassy.
TCB: How would this likely impact operations at the U.S. embassy?
Amb. Steven Pifer: First, let me qualify what I’m going to say — I don’t know the exact embassy staffing now, but I have seen a report saying it’s around 350 Americans and around 850 locally employed staff, which are Russians. My guess is what the embassy was doing this weekend was prioritizing what are the priority tasks, what are tasks that you can shed. I guess the bulk of the reductions are going to fall on Russian nationals, the support folks — for example, the motor pool, you’ll likely see people from that cut.
In 1986, I was at the American embassy in Moscow when the Soviets, after several rounds of expulsions, withdrew the 200 Russians who worked at the embassy. What we did was we basically set up something called all-purpose duty. Five or six days I would do my normal job, which was arms control in the political section, and then I’d go drive a truck for a day. Things like, okay, we lost all the drivers in the motor pool, so if you needed to go somewhere, you just went down and checked out a car and you drove yourself, or you took the metro, or you walked. There’s a lot of things that are nice to have in the embassy support structure that you don’t really need. What the embassy I imagine is doing now is identifying those slots, and they’ll cut those slots.
If I’m looking at core functions, in the consular section the priority would be American citizen services. Visas, to my mind, that’s toward the lower end of the scale. So what you’re going to probably see are delays in visa processing for Russians who want to come to the United States.
Amb. Sandy Vershbow: The embassy is still trying to fully assess just how deep the cuts will be, in what will be entirely or mostly the local Russian staff. There could be only 100 or so local staff left, and they do perform all kinds of important functions, so in the short-term, there could be some disruptions in consular services, and visa issuance could be sharply curtailed, which will hurt Russians’ ability to travel. Some of the maintenance, carpentry, electrician services could become difficult, and you may find Americans with PhDs having to repair plumbing and hang pictures and things like that, which happened in 1986 when all of the local staff were pulled. Some functions, like payroll, personnel, ultimately can be offshored if necessary, if the Russians don’t relent.
There definitely will be an impact that could affect quality of life among the embassy and consular staff, but they’ve risen to the challenge before. It doesn’t look like it will affect diplomatic personnel, but over time, there may be a need to substitute support people for people now doing political or economic reporting just to keep the embassy functioning. But it’s too soon to really speculate how much cutting of American personnel will be necessary here.
TCB: What do you make of the lack of statements from the White House or State Department so far about the demand? Where do you think this could go?
Pifer: I’ve seen nothing coming out of the White House, which, in a different world that might be weird, but in the world of President Donald Trump I don’t think it’s strange just because he does seem to be reluctant to be critical about any Russian action. And I’m not sure where this goes next. In theory this will equalize the number of people working at American diplomatic and consulate stations in Russia with those of Russians working in the United States. You can do tit-for-tat more, but at some point it becomes counterproductive from both sides.
I see this action, particularly given the timing, it was announced on Friday, it was directly linked to the final passage by Congress of the sanctions bill which codifies sanctions on Russia and authorizes new sanctions on Russia. Part of the reason I believe the Russians did this with such great fanfare — Vladimir Putin himself announced that they’ll have to reduce 755 people — is because they didn’t have anything else they could do.
A more appropriate sanction would have been to do something that would have hit back at the American economy, but the problem the Russians have is given the economic relationship between the United States and the West on one side and Russia, there’s nothing they can really do that would do anything comparable to the American economy that would match what American sanctions can do to the Russian economy. So they reached out for the thing they could find, which was this reduction in the total workforce in Russia, and most of the people who are going to be affected I think are the Russian workers at the embassy. There may be some Americans who will have to come home, but I think it’s going to be a relatively small number.
Vershbow: It’s partly a desire not to jump the gun and overreact to the Russian announcement until they fully assessed the real impact. Putin’s announcement was misleading in suggesting 755 Americans would have to depart. We now know it was not just Americans.
They don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat without thinking this through. I don’t think it’s foreclosed that the U.S. might take some countermeasures, but they might not be a direct tit-for-tat, but it might be some other area. The administration has been mum on that.
TCB: How do you think the U.S. should respond to this? What do you think the next step from the White House or State Department should be?
Pifer: I’m not sure another tit-for-tat in terms of expulsions makes a lot of sense just because the Russians will retaliate. And we do need to have some sort of minimum presence in Russia just as they need to have a minimum presence here. So maybe this is one where we say, ok, this is their response to the sanctions legislation, the president goes ahead and presumably signs it because I don’t think he wants to face a veto override, and then the response is going to be the implementation of that law.
Vershbow: Again, it depends on how damaging the impact is on U.S. operations in Russia. If, ultimately, the blow can be absorbed without too much dislocation and by hiring some Americans to fill the jobs being filled by Russians and cutting modestly in other areas and sort of getting through this, then the U.S. might be wise to just draw a line and move forward. The relationship is pretty curtailed by the sanctions and all the other political isolation we’ve been imposing on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, so there isn’t a compelling case for further counter escalation.
TCB: Given the recent announcement of Jon Huntsman as the pick to be U.S. Ambassador to Russia, what impact could these cuts have on someone new coming onto the scene?
Pifer: First of all, John Tefft, our current ambassador there, is a superb diplomat. He’s also a great manager. So I think when Ambassador Huntsman arrives to take up his duties, he’s going to find that embassy has been configured in the most logical way to operate given the reductions the Russians have imposed. I think he’s going to find that it can address all of the priorities concerns that he’s going to have in terms of pursuing U.S. interests in Russia.
I think he’s also going to find, if 1986 was any sign, and there’s no doubt in my mind, he’s going to find that Americans react in this kind of situation in a very resilient, resourceful way. The Russians in 1986 thought when they withdrew the Russian nationals they would bring the embassy basically to its knees, and in fact, it engendered this spirit within the embassy. Some of my closest friends in the Foreign Service were people I went through in Moscow in ’86 with, because there’s this idea that we’re going to show the Soviets that they can’t do this to us. And I have every reason to think the embassy now is going to show that same kind of spirit.
The belief that President Putin or the Foreign Ministry might have had that this is going to sort of rock the embassy and shake them to their foundations, I think they’re going to be surprised at just how well the embassy works.
Vershbow: Assuming he gets confirmed rather expeditiously, he’ll arrive at an embassy that’s going through a bit of a crisis in terms of how it runs its day-to-day operations as it absorbs the effects of these staff cuts. But I think the relationship was fraught before this happened, and it’s fraught today, so I think he knows what he’s getting into in terms of the politically toxic atmosphere.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
