*MOSCOW: *Russia said on Saturday that Britain had to reduce its diplomaticstaff by more than 50 more people as a crisis in ties between Moscow andthe West escalated over the nerve agent attack on a former spy.
The new measures came after 23 British diplomats left Russia earlier thismonth and are seen as Moscow’s punishment after Britain’s allies expelledRussian diplomats over the March 4 poisoning of former double agent SergeiSkripal and his daughter Yulia in an English city.
“Russia suggested parity. The British side has more than 50 more people,”foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told AFP.
On Friday, Moscow summoned British ambassador Laurie Bristow, giving Londona month to cut the number of diplomatic staff in Russia to the same numberRussia has in Britain.
He was summoned along with the heads of diplomatic missions from 23 othercountries who were told that some of their diplomats had to leave, in thebiggest wave of tit-for-tat expulsions in recent memory.
Bristow had been handed a protest note over the “provocative and unfoundedactions of the British side which instigated the unwarranted expulsion ofRussian diplomats from a variety of states,” the Russian foreign ministrysaid.
In London, a Foreign Office spokesperson said on Saturday: “We areconsidering the implication of the measures announced yesterday by theRussian foreign ministry.”
The Foreign Office had said it regretted the most recent developments butinsisted Russia was the culprit.
“This doesn’t change the facts of the matter: the attempted assassinationof two people on British soil, for which there is no alternative conclusionother than that the Russian state was culpable,” it said
More than 150 Russian diplomats have been ordered out of the US, EUmembers, NATO countries and other nations.
On Friday, Russia expelled diplomats from 23 countries — most of them EUmember states — in retaliation against the West.
France, Germany, Canada and Poland each said that Russia was expelling fourof their diplomats.
Other countries including Australia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Sweden, theCzech Republic, Finland, Lithuania and Norway were also told to pull theirenvoys. -APP/ AFP