The United States is cutting back on issuing non-immigrant visas to Russians. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow will temporarily stop issuing the visas next week, and consular offices will stop issuing them indefinitely, the State Department announced on Monday.
After September 1, visa issuances would be performed "on a greatly reduced scale,” and only from the embassy.
The change comes amid other diplomatic shakeups between the two countries, with Russia announcing Monday the appointment of a new ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, to replace Sergei Kislyak, who had been wound up in the ongoing scandal over Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The new visa policy comes after Russia decided to cut the number of U.S. diplomatic staff in Russia by 755 people by September 1, which happened after the imposition of new sanctions against Russia by Congress in July.
"We will operate at reduced capacity for as long as our staffing levels are reduced," the U.S. embassy in Russia said.
The suspension of visa issuances will have an immediate impact on the lives of Russians who had hoped to visit the United States.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov blasted the change in policy. "The American authors of these decisions have come up with another attempt to stir up discontent among Russian citizens about the actions of the Russian authorities," Lavrov said, according to Reuters.
Making it harder for Russians to obtain visas to the United States hampers their citizens’ ability to do business in the United States, see relatives, and take long-planned trips to the U.S. But the suspension of interviews for U.S. visas was unavoidable given the reduction of staff size at the embassy, according to experts.
“I would not be surprised if Russia anticipated this U.S. countermove,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency, who had served in the former Soviet Union. “I would have expected the Kremlin to have thought the United States would take this sort of measure. This is going to be part of an ongoing bilateral push and pull, tug of war.”
“President Putin most likely anticipated this U.S. policy decision and calculated its costs to his regime would not be greater than the benefit he would derive from reducing U.S. mission numbers in country.”
Hoffman also added that Lavrov’s attempts to blame the U.S. for the change would fail.
Another former member of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Sipher, told The Cipher Brief that scaling back on visa issuances was not only necessary, but also would remind Russians that the diplomatic decisions of their government regarding the U.S. have consequences.
“There is a political aspect to this as well. It is a clear signal to the Russians that what the Embassy does benefits Russians as well. If they want educational, shopping, or other trips to the U.S., they cannot make drastic cuts to the Embassy,” Sipher said.
“It puts potential pressure on Russian elites if they cannot get business visas, or if their children cannot get expedited visas for U.S. universities. It hits where it hurts.”
As for the appointment of Antonov, Sipher believes that the personality of the individual ambassador is not as important as the rapidly deteriorating condition of relations between the two age-old rivals, and “Putin’s undeclared war against the U.S.”
“I don't think that the role of any particular ambassador is that important,” he said. “There was a lot of press about the former ambassador, but I think that was over-hyped. These issues are far bigger than the personalities of individual ambassadors.”
Wilson Dizard is a national security editor at The Cipher Brief. Follow him on Twitter @willdizard.
