Russia Expels 85 European Diplomats in Retaliation

Date: 18 May 2022 - 22:06

News ID: ۱۰۲۷۴۷

LONDON (Dispatches) -- Russia said on Wednesday it was expelling a total of 85 embassy staff from France, Spain and Italy in response to similar moves by those countries, highlighting the damage to relations with leading European Union members since it launched its war on Ukraine.
The Foreign Ministry said it was ordering out 34 diplomatic staff from France, 27 from Spain and 24 from Italy.
The three countries are among European nations that have collectively thrown out more than 300 Russians since the Feb. 24 war. In many cases, they accused Russian diplomats of spying, which Moscow has denied.
Russia’s response has included sending home 45 Polish staff and 40 Germans last month. It has also announced tit-for-tat moves against Finland, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Japan, among others.
On the frontlines, Russia said nearly 700 more Ukrainian fighters had surrendered in Mariupol, but Kyiv was silent about their fate, while a pro-Russian separatist leader said commanders were still holed up in tunnels beneath the giant Azovstal steelworks.
More than a day after Kyiv announced it had ordered its garrison in Mariupol to stand down, the ultimate outcome of Europe’s bloodiest battle for decades remained unresolved. Ukrainian officials halted all public discussion of the fate of fighters who had made their last stand there.
“The state is making utmost efforts to carry out the rescue of our servicemen. Let’s wait. Currently, the most important thing is to save the lives of our heroes,” military spokesman Oleksandr Motuzaynik told a news conference. “Any information to the public could endanger that process.”
Russia’s ministry of defense said 694 more fighters had surrendered overnight, bringing the total number of people who had laid down arms to 959. The leader of pro-Russian separatists in control of the area, Denis Pushilin, was quoted by a local news agency DNA as saying the main commanders were still inside the plant.
Ukrainian officials had confirmed the surrender of more than 250 fighters on Tuesday. But they did not say how many more were inside or what might become of them.
The negotiations over the surrender of Mariupol came as Finland and Sweden formally applied to join NATO, bringing about the very expansion that Russian President Vladimir Putin has long cited as one of his main reasons for launching the “special military operation” in February.
The final surrender of Mariupol

would bring a close to a near three month siege of the once prosperous city of more than 400,000 people, where Ukraine says tens of thousands of civilians died under Russian bombardment.

Ukrainian officials have spoken of hopes to arrange a prisoner swap for Mariupol defenders they describe as national heroes. Moscow says no such deal was made for the fighters, many from a unit with far-right origins, which it calls Nazis.

The Kremlin says Putin has personally guaranteed the humane treatment of those who surrender. Other high-profile Russian politicians have publicly called for them never to be exchanged, or even for their execution.

The Swedish and Finnish ambassadors handed over their NATO membership application letters in a ceremony at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.

“This is a historic moment which we must seize,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

Turkey has surprised its allies in recent days by saying it will block the Nordic members’ accession unless they do more to crack down on Kurdish militants on their territory. Stoltenberg said he thought the issue could be overcome, and Washington has also said it expects it to be resolved.

New Generation of Laser Weapons

Russia said it was using a new generation of powerful laser weapons in Ukraine to burn up drones, deploying some of Moscow’s secret weapons to counter a flood of Western arms supplied to its former Soviet neighbor.

Putin in 2018 unveiled an array of new weapons including a new intercontinental ballistic missile, underwater nuclear drones, a supersonic weapon and a new laser weapon.

Little is known about the specifics of the new laser weapons. Putin mentioned one called Peresvet, named after a medieval Orthodox warrior monk Alexander Peresvet who perished in mortal combat.

Yury Borisov, the deputy prime minister in charge of military development, told a conference in Moscow that Peresvet was already being widely deployed and it could blind satellites up to 1,500 km above Earth.

He said, though, that there were already more powerful Russian systems than Peresvet that could burn up drones and other equipment. Borisov cited a test on Tuesday which he said had burned up a drone 5 km away within five seconds.

“If Peresvet blinds, then the new generation of laser weapons lead to the physical destruction of the target - thermal destruction, they burn up,” Borisov told Russian state television.

Asked if such weapons were being used in Ukraine, Borisov said: “Yes. The first prototypes are already being used there.” He said the weapon was called “Zadira”.

Almost nothing is publicly known about Zadira but in 2017 Russian media said Russia’s state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, helped develop it as part of a program to create weapons-based new physical principles, known by the Russian acronym ONFP.

Using lasers to blind satellites - or even burn them up - was once a fantasy from the realm of science fiction, but major powers such as the United States, China and Russia have been working on variants of such weapons for years.

Besides the benefits in conventional warfare of burning up drones, blinding reconnaissance systems has a strategic impact too as satellites are used to monitor intercontinental ballistic missiles which carry nuclear weapons.

Borisov said he had just returned from Sarov, a closed town in the Nizhny Novgorod region once known as Arzamas-16 because it was so secret, which is a centre of Russia’s nuclear weapons research.

He said a new generation of laser weapons using a wide electromagnetic band would ultimately replace conventional weapons. “This is not some sort of exotic idea; it is the reality,” Borisov said.