•To issue tit-for-tat responses to other countries
Russia has ordered 60 United States diplomats out of the country by April 5, the foreign ministry said yesterday.
It said 58 diplomats in Moscow and two general consulate officials in Yekaterinburg were persona non grata in a row over the poisoning of a former Russian double-agent in Britain.
The US consulate in St Petersburg was ordered shut down.
The move is a retaliation to the expulsion of more than 150 Russian diplomats across the world, following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that the US ambassador Jon Huntsman had been summoned to the Foreign Ministry and was informed of the “retaliatory measures”.
“They include the expulsion of the equivalent number of diplomats and our decision to withdraw permission for the functioning of the US consulate general in Saint Petersburg,” he added.
Mr Lavrov added that Russia would also issue tit-for-tat responses to the other countries that have expelled diplomats in a mass show of support for Britain which has blamed Moscow for the nerve agent attack.
“As for the other countries it’s also all symmetrical measures as to the number of people who will be leaving Russia from diplomatic missions, and that’s all so far,” Lavrov said. Skirpal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unresponsive and taken to Salisbury District Hospital after being attacked with nerve agent novichok on March 4.
Ms Skripal is no longer in a critical condition and “improving rapidly”. She has “responded well to treatment” but her father remains in a critical but stable condition, the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust said. Lavrov said that Russia was reacting to “absolutely unacceptable actions that are taken against us under very harsh pressure from the United States and Britain under the pretext of the so-called Skripal case.”
He accused London of “forcing everyone to follow an anti-Russian course.”