The US expelled two Russian diplomats in retaliation for an incident in which a Russian policeman tackled an American outside the embassy in Moscow, as relations between the two nations continue to sour.
The two diplomats were expelled on June 17, State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Friday, without giving additional details about the response to the June 6 confrontation in Moscow. Video released on Russian television this week appeared to show the policeman emerge from a guard booth and wrestle the man to the ground after he got out of a taxi at an embassy entrance.
"The action was unprovoked and it endangered the safety of our employee," Kirby said at an briefing earlier on Friday. He said the American was an accredited diplomat but otherwise declined to identify him.
The footage of the skirmish contradicts a version of the incident given by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who said on June 30 that the diplomat punched the police officer after he was stopped and asked for identification. Zakharova said the man was an undercover Central Intelligence Agency agent on his way back from an operation.
"The Russian claim that the policeman was protecting the embassy from an unidentified individual is simply untrue," Kirby said.
US-Russian ties have worsened in recent years, with tensions aggravated by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the two sides' disagreement over the war in Syria. The incident is part of a broader pattern in which Russian security services have "intensified their harassment against US personnel in an effort to disrupt our diplomatic and consular operations," Kirby said.
