The editors of the New York Times applaud the Obama Administration’s expulsion of officials in retaliation for Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee:
His latest response shows real teeth, chiefly in the form of sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services, the F.S.B. and GRU, including four top officers of the military intelligence unit who the White House believes ordered those attacks. Mr. Obama also placed sanctions against a number of other individuals and companies, such as the Special Technology Center, which conducts signal intelligence.
Mr. Obama also expelled 35 Russian intelligence operatives and barred Russian diplomats from using two recreational compounds in the United States. The White House said this action was specifically in response to a two-year pattern of harassment of American diplomats in Russia by Kremlin security personnel.
It will be interesting to see what the next shoe to drop will be. Although this might be it. It’s a Kremlin announcement that they don’t intend to retaliate in kind, gently mocking the Administration for retaliating against children (they implicitly characterize the “recreational compounds” mentioned above as areas for children), and inviting the children of American diplomats in Russia to Kremlin children’s New Year’s parties.
Of course the Russians won’t retaliate, they won. They pulled off the most successful intelligence operation since the Rosenberg’s gave Stalin the bomb. Putin will go down in Russian intelligence history for this. He put his toady in the White House – with a great deal of perhaps unwitting help from the great orange creep himself.
I think this confirms my comment about the current administrations error in using all its non-military tools against Russia over the Ukraine/Crimea.
This set of actions is symbolic, diplomats expulsion is not a heavy cost, and what does sanctioning a foreign spy agency even mean?
Imagine we had expelled diplomats over the Ukraine and reserved the economic sanctions until the DNC hacks, I would think Putin would be a lot more cautious about putting Russia in recession.
Something to think about when using economic sanctions in the future.
@CuriousOnlooker: The problem though is that the Ukraine matter gave rise to sanctions from most OECD countries and were probably as effective as these things tend to be (not very). I assume this incident would never give rise to much more than unilateral economic sanctions and not be effective at all