Russia expelled a senior Swedish diplomat on Monday in retaliation for a Russian envoy being kicked out of Stockholm last month in the latest incident reflecting the tensions mounting between Moscow and its Baltic neighbors.
Word of the tit-for-tat expulsion of the unnamed senior envoy coincided with disclosure by NATO sources that the dangerous practice of Russian and alliance warplanes violating sovereign airspace and provoking the scrambling of defensive sorties has escalated over the last two years to a level unprecedented since the end of the Cold War.
In a statement issued in Stockholm, the Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed one of its high-ranking diplomats had been banished from the embassy in Moscow. Foreign Ministry spokesman Johan Tegel told Swedish broadcaster SVT that the envoy was expelled for “acts improper to his post and status” — diplomatic shorthand for spying.
The Russian action followed the recent branding by the Swedish government of a Russian diplomat as persona non grata, for behavior inconsistent with diplomacy, another allusion to espionage.
Moscow’s relations with the former Baltic states of the Soviet Union — now-independent Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — as well as with former Warsaw Pact ally Poland and non-NATO member Sweden have been strained in recent years by Kremlin aggression against Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
Swedish naval authorities waged a massive weeklong hunt for a suspected Russian submarine spotted in the archipelago surrounding Stockholm in October. The vessel wasn’t found but Swedish security officials remain suspicious that the undersea intruders were sent by Moscow.
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