Moscow Wages War on Washington – via Twitter

The Kremlin has launched an online assault blasting the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow Michael McFaul. The spat flared up after Amb. McFaul gave a talk to students at one of Russia’s most prestigious universities. McFaul spoke frankly (he usually does) and chided the Russians on several fronts, including suggesting that they’d tried to bribe the Kyrgyz government to evict US forces from an airbase. Guardian correspondent Miriam Elder describes how Russian officials struck back, and the to and fro that followed online.

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Marco Werman: A protest of a different sort was launched last night. In this case it’s the Russian government using Twitter to protest statements made by the US Ambassador in Moscow. Ambassador Michael McFaul had given a talk to students at one of Russia’s most prestigious universities. The American diplomat was critical of Russian officials on several fronts. For example, McFaul said Russia offered the government of Kyrgyzstan a bribe in exchange for shutting down a US airbase there. The response from Russia’s Foreign Ministry officials was unusual, according to the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Miriam Elder.

Miriam Elder: Rather than sending, you know, a diplomatic note or a letter, they decided to take to their Twitter account pretty late last night and just, one after the other, started slamming McFaul for being unprofessional for criticizing their media and it just kind of turned into this global Twitter storm.

Werman: Now, Ambassador McFaul has actually used Twitter to make his points since he arrived in Moscow recently. This is not the first time is it?

Elder: No, that’s right. I mean it’s part of this wider State Department push, as I understand it, to speak more directly with the people in the country where the ambassadors are based. But, again, he’s not the one who brought this to Twitter. It was the Foreign Ministry, from their official Twitter account, that decided to make this all public. He simply reacted about four or five tweets in, trying to point out to the Foreign Ministry Twitter account that he in fact was giving a talk that was based around the progress that had been made in US-Russia relations in recent years.

Werman: Now, Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister, took to his Twitter account to write “I see that Russia MFA (The Ministry of Foreign Affairs) has launched a Twitter war against US Ambassador McFaul. That’s the new world – followers instead of nukes. Better.” So, Miriam, is Twitter acting as a sort of pressure release valve here?

Elder: I think McFaul’s use of Twitter has been really quite controversial in Russia. This is a government that stands on ceremony and for him to sort of bypass official channels and speak directly with Russian, speak directly with Russians democracy activists among the other people to is taken with I think a degree of criticism inside the corridors of power here.

Werman: So you’re saying maybe it’s better than a nuke, but all this back and forth on Twitter could end up somewhere that people possibly don’t want to be?

Elder: I think it’s definitely better than nukes, but I think the potential effect is more that it’s not necessarily helping the US-Russia relationship. Russia prioritizes a secrecy in high level contact and it’s not clear what it’s doing for the US-Russia relationship that McFaul for, you know, his own possibly noble causes is trying to create a new form of communication.

Werman: Ambassador McFaul is not a career diplomat. He’s a former Stanford University professor, and in response to this incident, one of his tweets said that he is still learning the craft of speaking more diplomatically. Do you think his combative style, if we can call it that, has been effective?

Elder: It depends on what the goal is. If his goal is piss off the Russian government, then it’s working. I suspect his goal is rather opposite. He has been the architect of the so called “reset” to bring US and Russian relations to a better level. It doesn’t seem like it’s quite working in that direction.

Werman: So what do you think this Twitter war tells us about the possibilities for US-Russian cooperation at this point? I mean they disagree on so many critical issues right now. Can the reset still be effective?

Elder: I think, as do many analysts, that the reset died some time ago. We’ve seen such a huge amount of criticism of the US ever since Putin started facing his own domestic problems here. He has really been blaming it on the US State Department. As for what this means for cooperation going forward, one has to ask why all of a sudden has this exploded so publicly. It started on Twitter. Today, we had some Kremlin officials speaking about it to the press, and it’s coming at a time when Russia is under a lot of pressure to be more cooperative in terms of Syria and I can’t help but think that maybe this is a sort of like distraction device, you know, create another storm to try to distract from another. It’s really incomprehensible otherwise.

Werman: Miriam, good to speak with you. Miriam Elder is based in Moscow for the Guardian newspaper. Thanks a lot.

Elder: Thank you.

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