How Russia Is Weaponizing International Students in the New Cold War

Russia is a top destination for international students and the most popular place for students from former Soviet countries to study. The country currently hosts more than 243,752 international students and considers international recruitment to be an important geopolitical goal.

More recently, Russia has resurrected and intensified the Soviet tradition of politicising student mobility. The government has requested that Russian students studying abroad should leave their new countries, when Russia’s political relations with those destinations deteriorate.

The Message That Putin’s Expulsion of U.S. Diplomats Sends to Trump

Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Sunday that he would require a dramatic reduction in the U.S. diplomatic mission to Russia is a personal message to Donald Trump—at once a last-ditch effort to gain some conciliations from a U.S. President who had promised them and an indication of how, despite early hopes in Moscow, Putin and those around him are gearing up for a more familiar, confrontational pose with Washington. The Kremlin’s thinking appears to be that if the United States is so intent on demonizing it, then, fine, let it have its Cold War—and anyway, mutual antagonism has come to be a comfortable, even habitual mode for the Putin state.

What will be the ramifications of Putin's order to reduce US embassy staff?

When it comes to diplomatic expulsions, Vladimir Putin likes to pull a surprise.

When the outgoing Barack Obama administration kicked out 35 Russian diplomats in December, the Russian president was widely expected to make a symmetrical response, but surprised everyone by doing nothing at all – apparently in the hope that relations would become rosier when Donald Trump took office.

Vladimir Putin to America: You've Let Me Down

Sunday night, Vladimir Putin went on national television and explained his decision to slice American diplomatic staff in Russia by two-thirds. He was retaliating for Barack Obama’s December expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats, as well as newly passed congressional sanctions, by kicking out 755 American diplomatic staff—a response over 20 times stronger than Obama’s original retaliation for Russian election meddling. But Putin sounded calm and humble, like a disappointed parent who has no choice left but to send a recalcitrant child to military school. “We were waiting for a long time, thinking that maybe something will change for the better; we kept hope alive that the situation will change,” Putin said. “But judging by everything that’s happened, if something’s going to change, it won’t be soon.”

Russia is retaliating against new US sanctions in a big way

Russia will force the US diplomatic mission in the country to eliminate hundreds of people from its workforce by September 1, President Vladimir Putin told state TV in an interview that aired on Sunday.

"More than 1,000 workers — diplomats and support staff — were working and are still working in Russia; 755 must stop their activity in the Russian Federation," Putin said, per Reuters. This does not mean, as early news reports suggested, that 755 US diplomats will be expelled from the country entirely — but it is a serious cut to America’s diplomatic presence in Russia.

Moscow spooks return to Hungary, raising NATO hackles

NATO allies are worried about expanding Russian intelligence operations in Hungary.

While Western officials have often criticized the government in Budapest for backsliding on democracy, they’ve tended to praise it for a steadfast commitment to NATO. But officials from allied countries say Russia increasingly sees Hungary as an operational backdoor into Europe.