Do embassies serve any purpose? What does the tit for tat expulsion of diplomats from the respective embassies in Berlin and Moscow mean?
In yesterday’s News Review on Press TV (Iran), I and my fellow panelist John Steppling in Norway were given an opportunity to explain the forces behind the German decision to expel more than 30 Russians as well as Russia’s mirror response in sending German diplomats home as persona non grata.
For my part, I tried to highlight what the loss of about 40% of staff means for the functioning of an embassy and for those dependent on its consular services. This is because the embassies perform an invaluable service to their nationals living in the host country.
There may be well more than a million Russian passport holders who are long time residents in Germany and require assistance of the consulate to renew passports, to register the birth of children, to validate powers of attorney for settlement of property issues in Russia, and so forth. I am speaking now of what I have seen at the Russian consulate in Brussels: most of those who were being served were RF citizens, not foreigners seeking visas. Ironically, given the Russophobe thinking in Germany behind the sharp cut-back of embassy personnel, the RF citizens were highly diverse in ethnic terms, meaning that many obviously came from the Caucasus regions and other minority peoples.
Can we foresee the closure of the respective embassies in the not too distant future? That is really a possibility because it corresponds to the misstatement by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock about a month ago that Russia and Germany are “at war.”
Does the mass expulsion of diplomats bring us closer to real war? Listen in…
Russia to expel German diplomats in tit-for-tat move
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