Schiff Never Complained when Obama Normalized Relations with Putin

Posted on April 2, 2018April 2, 2018 by Denise Simon

Remember, under the Obama administration, rogue nations such as Iran and Cuba were placed as among the world’s good actors. Hillary went to Russia with a ‘reset button’ and gave Moscow more authority and power in regions of major conflict. Yet it is Congressman Adam Schiff and his friendly democrat friends that are continuing to whine about Trump’s interactions with Russia or Russians.

So, Obama set the table on the friendly approach to Medvedev and Putin and Russian aggression around the world has more than threatened equilibrium, it is deadly.

Have you wondered why Bashir al Assad has not been brought before a global tribunal for war crimes?

UNITED NATIONS – Russia and China on Thursday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution referring the Syrian crisis to the International Criminal Court for investigation of possible war crimes, prompting angry responses from the proposal’s supporters who said the two countries should be ashamed.

This is the fourth time Russia and China have used their veto power as permanent council members to deflect action against the government of President Bashar Assad. The 13 other council members voted in favor of the resolution.

More than 60 countries signed on to support the French-drafted measure, in a dramatic demonstration of international backing for justice in the conflict which has sent millions fleeing and killed more than 160,000, according to activists. More here.

*** That is right, Russia has veto power and they have used it since at least 2014. Does it even make sense that Russia is part of the Security Council in the first place? Nope…

As the United States continues to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, who has been supplying the Taliban with weapons? Yup…Russia. You see, Russia has training operations with real fighting equipment and when the training is complete, they leave the high tech equipment behind and tell the Taliban to come get it.

Did Adam Schiff or Maxine Waters get on TV and demand impeachment over Obama’s relationship with Moscow? Nah….

While not a fan at all of MSNBC, Richard Engle however did an exceptional reporting piece on Putin including who else was to be assassinated by poison, including Christopher Steele of the Trump dossier.

So, in solidarity with Britain, the Trump administration took aggressive action in expelling several Russian diplomats (read spies) as did at least almost three dozen other countries. Trump also closed the Russian diplomatic post in Seattle. What was going on there was terrifying and it is questionable on why Obama did not order it closed in December of 2016. Read below for what the FBI knew and yet was unable to take action due to the Obama White House.

Escalating tit for tat, US orders Russian consulate closed ... Russian post in Seattle

Among the 27 countries that have retaliated for what is believed to be a Kremlin-ordered chemical-weapon attack on an ex-Russian intelligence officer and his daughter in Britain earlier this month, the United States took by far the most dramatic steps: ousting 60 diplomats in total, including 15 suspected intelligence operatives based at Russia’s United Nations Mission alone—the most significant action of its type since the Reagan administration. (The move prompted Russia, on Thursday, to announce the expulsion of 60 U.S. diplomats and the closure of the U.S. consulate in Saint Petersburg.) But it was the Trump administration’s announcement of the shuttering of Russia’s consulate in Seattle that turned heads. Why Seattle? What was going on there? Would the closure matter?

While Seattle is an important city for Russian intelligence collection efforts domestically, its consulate’s profile has generally been quieter than San Francisco’s or New York’s, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials who asked to remain anonymous but have knowledge of Russian activities in these areas. But the closure of the consulate is noteworthy nonetheless: Along with the administration’s shuttering of the San Francisco consulate in 2017, Russia will now lack a diplomatic facility west of Houston, or any diplomatic presence on the West Coast for the first time since 1971. Russian intelligence officers—at least those under diplomatic cover—will no longer operate in easy proximity to America’s two great tech capitals. Indeed, at least in Seattle, suspected Russia spies have already been caught attempting to infiltrate local tech companies.

“Certainly, there were enough issues that were important to the Russians in Seattle—the naval bases, Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon,” says John Sipher, a former CIA officer who worked closely with the FBI on counterespionage issues. “There was always nervousness within the national security agencies that the sheer number of ethnic Russians in these industries was something the Russians could take advantage of. I don’t know if closing Seattle was a strategic choice; nonetheless, the concentration of high-tech and military resources makes it a sensible target.”

After the closure of the Russian consulate in San Francisco, former senior U.S. intel officials told me that facility had, for decades, functioned as the primary hub for Russian intelligence-gathering in the Western United States. It featured key classified communications systems, and was a crucial collection center in Russia’s long-running effort to map out America’s fiber-optic cable network.

One of the two anonymous former intelligence officials I spoke with called Seattle a top-five U.S. city for Russian counterintelligence work, but a “smaller operation” than San Francisco. Seattle did not have the same type of communications facilities as San Francisco, the two former officials said. In fact, Russian diplomats used to regularly drive a van with protected diplomatic information from San Francisco to Seattle, said a second official, though the frequency of those trips decreased over time, when U.S. officials suspected the Russians had begun to move their communications to encrypted channels online.

Still, the Seattle area has some rich espionage targets. Firms like Boeing and Microsoft have long been of interest to Russian operatives, the former intel officials said. So have the many military bases in the area, including, pre-eminently, Naval Base Kitsap, located just across the Puget Sound from Seattle and home to eight nuclear-armed submarines. Administration officials have openly cited the Seattle consulate’s proximity to Boeing, and sensitive military bases, as reasons for its closure.

Because there is a seven-hour float from Kitsap to these nuclear-armed submarines’ dive point, the two former officials said, there are numerous opportunities to track the subs’ movements—a longstanding concern for U.S. intelligence and military officials. Knowing when a submarine is headed out to sea or how many submarines are running patrols at a given time, and potentially identifying new technologies on these vessels, are all valuable pieces of intelligence, these officials said. Moreover, U.S. intel officials have worried that in a worst-case-scenario—actual armed hostilities between the two countries—information gleaned from Russian operatives in the Pacific Northwest could be used to identify “choke points.” For instance, they might know the ideal places to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at a fishing boat in a narrow channel, which could prevent military vessels from deploying.

In the past, suspected intel operatives based at Russia’s Seattle consulate were observed engaging in the same sorts of behavior as their counterparts in San Francisco, the two former intel officials said, including tracking down potential fiber-optic nodes (as part of Russia’s long-term effort to map where data were being transferred), or Cold War-era intelligence-collection sites, in Northwestern forests. U.S. officials also believed Russian operatives were traveling to remote beaches in the area in order to “signal,” or cryptically transmit and receive data, with interlocutors offshore. (There was a specific beach in Oregon these individuals would favor, the two former officials said.)

More recently, however, these activities appeared to die down, these individuals said, an event one of the former intel officials attributes to Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, which some in the intelligence community believe led Russia to overhaul its strategies for domestic intelligence-gathering. Generally, this person said, Seattle seemed like a “proving ground” for junior Russian intelligence officers, a place to send less-experienced operatives to acclimate them to the United States. After Snowden, U.S. intel officials started seeing more “travelers” in the Seattle area—suspected intelligence operatives working under both diplomatic and nonofficial cover—flying in remotely to meet with individuals, the two former officials said.

The biggest Russia-related concern in Seattle was “cyber-related activities,” which were separate from the consulate, the two former officials said—including those of the local Kaspersky Labs affiliate. In July 2017, U.S. officials banned Moscow-based Kaspersky, which produces anti-virus software, from being used on any government computers, over fears about the company’s connections to Russian intelligence. U.S. counterintelligence officials were concerned that Kaspersky was being used as a tool for Russian covert communications, the two former officials said, and were also examining whether individuals affiliated with Kaspersky were actual engaging in cyber-espionage domestically. “As a private company, Kaspersky Lab does not have inappropriate ties to any government, including Russia, and the company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyber espionage efforts,” a spokesperson for Kaspersky said. “The U.S. government actions against Kaspersky Lab lack sufficient basis, are unconstitutional, have been taken without any evidence of wrongdoing by the company, and rely upon subjective, non-technical public sources, such as uncorroborated and often anonymously sourced media reports, related claims, and rumors, which is why the company has challenged the validity of these actions in federal court.“

“Was Kaspersky looking at Microsoft or Boeing as opportunities to exploit? Was it just business development? Or were they actually engaged in trying to penetrate these enterprises?” asked one of the former officials. “The suspicions on Kaspersky have pretty much been borne out … when you look at the recent U.S. government decision, and what has been publicly reported on what the Israelis have been able to find out.” In 2017 the New York Times reported that Israeli intelligence had hacked into a Russian espionage operation, observing Russian operatives using back doors in Kaspersky software to scan for, and purloin, U.S. intelligence documents.

Russia’s interest in Microsoft is also well-documented. In 2010, U.S. officials deported Alexey Karetnikov, a 23-year-old Russian national, from the Seattle area, where he had been working at Microsoft as a software tester. U.S. officials believed he was actually a Russian intelligence officer, and linked him to the ring of 10 “illegals”—Russian deep-cover operatives who had been living in the United States—that U.S. officials had arrested and deported earlier that year. Two of those undercover operatives, Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills (whose real names are Mikhail Kutsik and Natalia Pereverzeva), had lived in Seattle for years, even starting a family there. In Seattle, Kutsik worked at a telecommunications firm, and both operatives took finance classes at the University of Washington. In a 2017 article in Seattle Met Magazine, Kutsik and Pereverzeva’s former investments professor said he believed the Russians were interested in his class because many of his students went on to work for Amazon, Boeing or Microsoft. Kutsik, Pereverzeva and Karetnikov were not known to have been coordinating their activities with the Seattle consulate, one of the former officials said.

Even as Russian espionage continues to migrate outside consular facilities—to travelers, and individuals working locally under nonofficial cover—it is “no coincidence” that both shuttered diplomatic outposts were on the West Coast, said one of the former officials. No matter when—or if—these two consulates are reopened, Russian interest in the West Coast is likely to continue far into the foreseeable future.

Where is Adam Schiff now?

Russia Expels Western Diplomats then Announces High Tech Weapons

Posted on March 29, 2018March 29, 2018 by Denise Simon

“U.S. ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman has been summoned to our ministry, where my deputy Sergei Ryabkov is briefing him on the tit-for-tat steps against the U.S.,” Lavrov said, according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.

“They include the expulsion of the same number of diplomats and our decision to withdraw consent to the work of the Consulate General in St. Petersburg.” More here.

Russia to Expel U.S. Diplomats, Close St. Petersburg ... photo

Meanwhile….

Robotics, artificial intelligence, and a willingness to strike the enemy’s non-military targets will figure in the country’s future strategies.

The U.S. military isn’t alone in its plans to pour money into drones, ground robots, and artificially intelligent assistants for command and control. Russia, too, will be increasing investment in these areas, as well as space and information warfare, Russian Army Gen. Valery Gerasimov told members of the Russian Military Academy of the General Staff last Saturday. In the event of war, Russia would consider economic and non-military government targets fair game, he said.

The comments are yet another sign that the militaries of the United States and Russia are coming more and more to resemble one another in key ways — at least in terms of hyping future capabilities. The chief of the General Staff said the Russian military is already developing new drones that could perform strike as well as reconnaissance missions. On the defensive side, the military is investing in counter-drone tech and electromagnetic warfare kits for individual troops.

The Russians are building an “automated reconnaissance and strike system,” he said, describing an AI-drive system that sounds a bit like the Maven and Data to Decision projects that the United States Air Force is pursuing. The goal, according to Gerasimov, was to cut down on the time between reconnaissance for target collection and strike by a factor of 2.5, and to improve the accuracy of strike by a factor of two. The Russian government is developing new, high-precision strike weapons for the same purpose. “In the future, precision weapons, including advanced hypersonics, will allow for the transfer the fundamental parts of strategic deterrence to non-nuclear weapons,” he said.

Sam Bendett, a research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, says the moves signal that the Russian military is trying to push fighting further away from its borders, thus growing the area to which it can deny access, or at least appear to do so. “Russia’s current force composition is aiming at short-range, short-duration conflict where its forces can overwhelm the adversary close to Russian borders. The new technology Gerasimov discusses would allow Russia to conduct deep-strikes within enemy territory, thus ‘pushing’ the actual fighting far from Russian borders and Russian vulnerability to Western precision-guided weapons,” he said.

What would Gerasimov hit with those weapons? In his talk, the Russian general said that enemy economic and non-military aspects of government could be on the list of potential targets. “The objects of the economy and the state administration of the enemy will be subject to immediate destruction, in addition to the traditional spheres of armed struggle, the information sphere and space will be actively involved,” he told the audience.

Says Bendett, “the use of such technologies is especially important given the type of war Moscow intends to fight. Gerasimov stated that potential adversary’s economic targets, as well as government’s ability to govern, will be fair game. Striking deep into enemy territory can be accomplished more easily by unmanned systems—whether armed with EW, various sensors or strike components … All this also depends on the Russian military-industrial complex’s ability to properly marshal the needed resources in an organized fashion in order to field this technology.”

One other explanation for the tough talk: Russia is hardly an even match for the United States in terms of either military spending or capability. The recently announced $61 billion increase in the U.S. military budget over last year’s budget (bringing the total to $700 billion) is greater than the entire Russian military budget, which sits around $46 billion. That number represents about 2.86 percent of Russian GDP. In December, Putin said that the government would “reduce” future expenditures.

“Gerasimov is, like anyone in a senior military post, a lobbyist as much as a soldier, and at a time when the Russian defense budget is going to continue to shrink, he is doing what he can both to maintain it as high as possible and also to tilt procurement away from older-fashioned metalwork — which is really a way for the Kremlin to subsidise the defence industries rather than what the military want — and towards advanced communications, reconnaissance and targeting capabilities,” said Mark Galeotti, the head of the Center for European Security at UMV, the Institute of International Relations, Prague.

According to Bendett, Russian government leaders are “hedging against impending geopolitical and economic uncertainty by trying to keep their military budget within certain parameters. The [Ministry of Defense] has been talking repeatedly about the rising share of new military tech in service of the Russian military, slowly phasing out older systems in favor of new ones. So the high-tech approach that Gerasimov outlined — space-based weapons, ‘military robots’ — is the next evolutionary stage in Russian military’s evolution to a more high-tech, sophisticated forces capable of rapid strike.”

Gerasimov also took a moment to denounce what he claimed were Western attempts to destabilize the Russian government through information and influence warfare and other subtle tactics. The charge may strike Western audiences as brazenly hypocritical given the Kremlin’s on-going attempts to sow misinformation to global audiences through social media, email theft and propaganda campaigns. But it’s an old talking point for Gerasimov.

Said UMV’s Galeotti: “At a time when the Kremlin is demonstrably worried about what it sees as Western ‘gibridnaya voina‘ [or hybrid war] being waged against it — we don’t have to accept their premises to acknowledge that the Russians genuinely believe this — he is staking out the military’s claims to being relevant in this age. And his answer, as in his infamous 2013 article, and as played out in the first stage of Zapad [the major wargame Russia executed in Belarus last summer] is that the military will deploy massive firepower to smash any foreign incursions meant to instigate risings against Moscow.”

U.S. Caps Money at 25% of UN Peacekeeping

Posted on March 29, 2018March 29, 2018 by Denise Simon

photo

For the most part, peacekeepers do not achieve the standards of their home country for military or humanitarian positions, so they are dispatched to the United Nations.

Conflicts where peacekeepers are deployed are also near countries at the top of the list.

The UN’s peacekeepers currently have operations in Western Sahara, Central African Rebpublic, Mali, Haiti, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon, Abyei, South Sudan, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Liberia and India and Pakistan.

China’s peacekeepers will form part of the “Peacekeeping Capability Readiness System”, a rapid-deployment standby force.

Its move to become one of the largest forces in the UN’s peacekeepers indicates its growing presence on the world stage, while also saying that China is a responsible power.

The UN’s current peacekeeping budget stands at £5.25bn, and its force has been implemented in 69 missions over the past 68 years. Click here to see the personnel donations from listed countries.

photo

US: Won’t pay over 25 percent of UN peacekeeping anymore

UNITED NATIONS — The United States will no longer shoulder more than a quarter of the multibillion-dollar costs of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations, Washington’s envoy said Wednesday.

“Peacekeeping is a shared responsibility,” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said at a Security Council debate on peacekeeping reform. “All of us have a role to play, and all of us must step up.”

The U.S. is the biggest contributor to the U.N.’s 15 peacekeeping missions worldwide. Washington is paying about 28.5 percent of this year’s $7.3 billion peacekeeping budget, though Haley said U.S. law is supposed to cap the contribution at 25 percent.

The second-biggest contributor, China, pays a bit over 10 percent.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has complained before that the budget and Washington’s share are too high and pressed to cut this year’s budget. It is $570 million below last year’s, a smaller decrease than the U.S. wanted.

“We’re only getting started,” Haley said when the cut was approved in June. It followed a $400 million trim the prior year, before Trump’s administration.

Haley said Wednesday that the U.S. will work to make sure cuts in its portion are done “in a fair and sensible manner that protects U.N. peacekeeping.”

The General Assembly sets the budget and respective contributions by vote. Spokesmen for Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declined to comment on Haley’s remarks, noting that the 193 U.N. member states will decide the budget.

Drawing over 105,000 troops, police and other personnel from countries around the world, the peacekeeping missions operate in places from Haiti to parts of India and Pakistan. Most are in African countries. The biggest is in Congo, where the Security Council agreed just Tuesday to keep the 16,000-troop force in place for another year.

Some missions have been credited with helping to protect civilians and restore stability, but others have been criticized for corruption and ineffectiveness.

In Mali, where 13,000 peacekeepers have been deployed since 2013, residents in a northern region still “don’t feel safe and secure,” Malian women’s rights activist Fatimata Toure told the Security Council on Wednesday. She said violence remains pervasive in her section of a country that plunged into turmoil after a March 2012 coup created a security vacuum.

“We have still not felt (the peacekeeping mission) deliver on its protection-of-civilians mandate,” though it has helped in some other ways, Toure said. “We feel, as civilians, that we’ve been abandoned, left to our fate.”

Peacekeeping also has been clouded by allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation. An Associated Press investigative series last year uncovered roughly 2,000 claims of such conduct by peacekeepers and other U.N. personnel around the world during a 12-year period.

Maintaining peace has become increasingly deadly work. Some 59 peacekeepers were killed through “malicious acts” last year, compared to 34 in 2016, Guterres said Wednesday. A U.N. report in January blamed many of the deaths on inaction in the field and “a deficit of leadership” from the world body’s headquarters to remote locations.

Guterres said Wednesday that the U.N. is improving peacekeepers’ training, has appointed a victims’ rights advocate for victims of sexual abuse and is reviewing all peacekeeping operations.

Still, he said, more needs to be done to strengthen peacekeeping forces and ensure they are deployed in tandem with political efforts, not instead of them. They also shouldn’t be overloaded with unrealistic expectations, he said.

“Lives and credibility are being lost,” he said. “A peacekeeping operation is not an army or a counterterrorist force or a humanitarian agency.”

Representatives from many countries also stressed a need for more focused, better prepared peacekeeping missions and more robust political peace processes.

The U.N., its member states and countries that host peacekeeping missions all “need to shoulder our responsibilities,” said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose country arranged the debate as this month’s Security Council president.

2 Russians May not Survive Poison, but What about Lesin’s Murder?

Posted on March 28, 2018March 28, 2018 by Denise Simon

As of the time this article is published, the Kremlin is turning the blame of the attempted assassination in Britain on the Brits themselves. There is overwhelming evidence that the poisoning was in fact done at the hands of thugs at the behest of Moscow.

Russia has denied any involvement in the attack and has said it suspects the British secret services of using the Novichok nerve agent, which was developed by the Soviet military, to frame Russia and stoke anti-Russian hysteria.

photo

“We believe the Skripals first came into contact with the nerve agent from their front door,” said Dean Haydon, Britain’s’ senior national coordinator for counter terrorism policing. More here from Reuters.

Noisy Room has an excellent summary on Skripal and his daughter, that sadly are not expected to survive the assassination attempt by novichok. In part:

Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, are still hospitalized and are in critical condition in Britain after being exposed to the Russian nerve agent called novichok. Authorities now believe it was applied to their front door and that is how they came into contact with it. This is a military grade nerve agent that has no cure.

Skripal’s niece, Viktoria Skripal, told the BBC that the two have about a one percent chance of surviving. If they do, they will be crippled physically and mentally for the rest of their lives. The effects are debilitating and the pain continues to grow. It is prolonged torture until the victim succumbs and dies. She said the prognosis “really isn’t good.” The attack took place on March 4th in Salisbury. “Out of 99 percent, I have maybe 1 percent hope,” she said. “Whatever [nerve agent] was used, it has given them a very small chance of survival. But they’re going to be invalids for the rest of their lives.” More here.

*** But the United States is not without a successful assassination that happened in Washington DC, that seems to continue to be a major coverup. Further, the Obama administration did nothing to Moscow regarding the case.

BuzzFeed News has uncovered new information in its ongoing investigation into the strange death of Russia Today founder and Vladimir Putin’s former media czar Mikhail Lesin on Nov. 5, 2015, thanks – in part – to a report by Christopher Steele.

photo

The [FBI] received his report while it was helping the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department investigate the Russian media baron’s death, the sources said.

(…)

Now BuzzFeed News has established:

• Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.

• The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.

• Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.

The Steele report is not the FBI’s only source for this account of Lesin’s death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele.

DC police said Lesin died from a series of drunken falls, which just happened to take place the evening before Lesin was scheduled to meet with U.S. Justice Department officials to discuss the inner workings of RT.

BuzzFeed News has been out front on the issue of questionable deaths under Putin’s regime, and in the wake of the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England on March 4th, the British government says it is taking another look at 14 incidents BuzzFeed has flagged as suspicious.

Meanwhile, the way authorities claim Lesin died in a Dupont Circle hotel in the heart of Washington, DC defies logic.

“What I can tell you is that there isn’t a single person inside the bureau who believes this guy got drunk, fell down, and died,” an FBI agent told BuzzFeed News last year. “Everyone thinks he was whacked and that Putin or the Kremlin were behind it.”

In December, DC police released 58 pages of its case file on Lesin’s death. While many parts are blacked out, what was released says nothing about the blunt force injuries that killed Lesin — or even about him falling down, which is how he is supposed to have died.

(…)

For his report to the FBI about Lesin, Steele gathered intelligence from high-level sources in Moscow, according to the two sources who read the whole report.

All four of the people who read Steele’s report said it pins Lesin’s murder on a professional relationship gone lethally awry. According to the report, they said, Lesin fell out with a powerful oligarch close to Putin. Wanting to intimidate Lesin, the oligarch then contracted with Russian state security agents to beat up Lesin, the report states, according to three of the sources. The goal was not to kill Lesin, all four sources said Steele wrote, but Lesin died from the attack.

The sources could not recall what, if anything, the report said about whether Putin knew of or sanctioned the attack.

Full story: Christopher Steele’s Other Report: A Murder In Washington (BuzzFeed News)

The British Government Will Review Allegations Of Russian Involvement In 14 Suspicious Deaths Exposed By BuzzFeed News (BuzzFeed News)

Related: More Mystery in Russia-Connected DC Death

From CIR’s Human Rights Abuses page:

Eight high-profile Russians have died since the November 8, 2016 U.S. presidential election. Buzzfeed has been investigating 14 suspicious deaths on British soil with ties to Russia that have taken place under Putin’s regime. The news site also has filed a lawsuit to speed up the FBI’s possible release of information pertaining to the suspicious death of Putin’s former media czar, Mikhail Lesin, in a DC hotel the night before he was scheduled to meet with the U.S. Department of Justice back in November 2015.

Trump and Allies Expel Russian Diplomats/Operatives

Posted on March 26, 2018March 26, 2018 by Denise Simon

President Donald Trump ordered 60 Russian diplomats the U.S. considers spies to leave the country and closed Russia’s consulate in Seattle. The closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle due to its proximity to one of our submarine bases and Boeing.” The U.S. officials said more than 100 Russian intelligence agents work under cover as diplomats in the U.S. and described the number as unacceptable. They said the U.S. could take further action in the future. The 60 people expelled from the U.S. include 48 attached to the Russian embassy and 12 at the country’s mission to the United Nations. They have seven days to leave the country, the officials said. More here.

Russian consulate, Seattle

London (CNN)It’s the biggest collective expulsion of alleged Russian intelligence officers in history, according to British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Diplomats are being kicked out of at least 21 countries — 16 European Union states, the United States, Canada, Ukraine, Norway and Albania — in a coordinated effort that represents a significant diplomatic victory for the UK, which blames Russia for poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

The UK has already expelled 23 Russian diplomats. Moscow retaliated by sending the same number of UK diplomats back, and by shuttering British cultural institutions in the country.

Here’s what each country is doing:

European Union nations

Croatia: Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said Croatia will expel one diplomat.

Czech Republic: The Czech Republic will expel three diplomats, Prime Minister Andrej Babis and Foreign Minister Martin Stropnicky announced a press conference. The Czech Foreign Ministry tweeted that it declared the diplomats “personae non gratae.”

The UK had already expelled 23 Russian diplomats. People were seen hugging at the Russian Embassy in London on March 20.

Denmark: The Foreign Ministry announced two diplomats would be expelled. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and clearly say no to Russia at a time when Russia is also in threatening and seeking to undermine Western values and the rule-based international order in other areas,” Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said.

Estonia: Estonia Foreign Ministry told CNN one Russian diplomat, a Russian defense attaché, will be expelled.

Finland: Finland will expel one diplomat, the Foreign Ministry said.

France: French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced the expulsion of four diplomats, who must leave the country within a week. He said that the decision followed the European Council’s conclusions that the attack “posed a serious threat to our collective security” and that France was acting “in solidarity with our British partners.”

Germany: The German Foreign Ministry said Monday it would expel four diplomats. “In close coordination within the European Union and with NATO allies, the Federal Government has decided to ask four Russian diplomats to leave Germany within seven days. The request was sent to the Russian Embassy today,” the ministry said in a statement.

Hungary: The Foreign Ministry said Hungary would expel one diplomat over “what has been discussed at the European Council meeting,” adding that the diplomat was “also conducting intelligence activities.”

Italy: The Italian Foreign Ministry says it will expel two Russian diplomats from the embassy in Rome “as a sign of solidarity with the United Kingdom and in coordination with the European partners and NATO.”

Latvia: The Foreign Ministry told CNN it would expel one diplomat and one private citizen who runs the office of a Russian company in the capital, Riga.

Lithuania: Foreign Affairs Minister Linas Linkevicius said on Twitter the country would expel three diplomats “in solidarity with the UK over #SalisburyAttack.” Lithuania would also sanction an additional 21 individuals and ban 23 more from entering the country.

Netherlands: Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the expulsion of two diplomats, saying the use of chemical weapons was unacceptable.

Poland: Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it would expel four diplomats and said the attack showed how “a similar immediate threat to the territory and citizens of EU and NATO member states can happen anywhere.”

Romania: Romania’s Foreign Ministry said on Twitter that one diplomat would be expelled.

Spain: The Foreign Ministry said Spain will expel two diplomats. “From the outset, we have considered the nerve agent attack in Salisbury to be an extremely serious development that represents a significant threat to our collective security and to international law,” the ministry said on Twitter.

Sweden: The Foreign Ministry told CNN it will expel one diplomat.

Non-EU countries

Albania: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs told CNN it will expel two Russian diplomats. In a statement, the ministry said called each diplomat a “persona non grata” and said the pair’s activities were “not compliant to their diplomatic status.”

Canada: Ottawa said it was expelling four Russian diplomats alleged to be intelligence officers “or individuals who have used their diplomatic status to undermine Canada’s security or interfere in our democracy.” Additionally it was refusing three applications by Moscow for additional diplomatic staff. “The nerve agent attack represents a clear threat to the rules-based international order and to the rules that were established by the international community to ensure chemical weapons would never again destroy human lives,” Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said.

Norway: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs told CNN it would expel one Russian diplomat in response to the attack. “The use of a nerve agent in Salisbury is a very serious matter,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide said in a statement. “Such an incident must have consequences.”

Ukraine: President Petro Poroshenko said Ukraine, which has experienced years of hostility from Russia, including the annexation of Crimea, would expel 13 diplomats. “Russia has again reconfirmed its disdainful attitude to the sovereignty of independent states and the value of human life.”

United States: The White House said it was expelling 60 Russian diplomats identified as intelligence agents and also announced the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. It represents the most forceful action Trump has taken against Russia to date. Of those being expelled, 48 of the alleged intelligence agents work at the Russian embassy in Washington and 12 are posted at the United Nations in New York, senior administration officials said.