The Russian embassy in Washington will be a different kind of battleground

On a warm evening in June, Benjamin Wittes sat at a card table across from the Russian embassy in Washington, where he performed his light show.

Around him was a tangle of wires and equipment, including a laptop and two powerful light projectors. One of them beamed a huge blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag onto the embassy’s white facade.

That was just the beginning. “We have a little essay that we’re going to project line by line in three languages,” said Mr. Wittes, a leading expert on national security law. “It’s about stolen children.” By the end of the evening, he was beaming profanity in Ukrainian about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the towering embassy structure.

Mr. Wittes and his friends have lit up the embassy once every few weeks since the start of the war in Ukraine last year. It clearly gets under the skin of the Russians. On this night, the Russians tried to blot out his projections with projections of their own, including two giant white Zs – a nationalistic Russian symbol of the war effort.

Once, last spring, a Russian floodlight chased a Ukrainian flag across the facade of the embassy in a slapstick cat-and-mouse game that has since been viewed millions of times online. In April, a burly man in jeans and a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt emerged from the embassy and quietly blocked Mr. Wittes’ projectors with an open umbrella in each hand.

“They come into the spotlight with us,” said Mr. Wittes. “It’s really very youthful.”

It’s also the strange new normal around Russia’s main diplomatic outpost in the United States, a scene of near-constant protests, spy games and general madness as the most hostile relations in decades between the United States and Russia play out in the heart of Washington. . . Thousands of miles from the front in Ukraine, the embassy grounds have become a battlefield of their own.

The Russian ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, called it “a besieged fortress.” Within the high fences surrounded by security cameras, the compound is a self-contained village, complete with an apartment complex for diplomats and their families, along with a school, playground, and swimming pool. On a recent afternoon, a young girl was seen skateboarding near a vegetable patch.

In recent years, no fewer than 1,200 Russian personnel have worked on the embassy grounds. The State Department won’t say how many are left — the workforce here and at the US embassy in Moscow is now a touchy subject — but in January 2022 Mr. Antonov estimated the number at 184 diplomats and support staff.

And while embassy staff may be some of Washington’s least welcome residents, Biden officials are happy to be here. It is essential to maintain diplomatic ties, even in the worst of times, they say. Kicking the Russians out completely would also mean the end of the US diplomatic presence in Moscow, which, among other things, helps US citizens imprisoned in Russia.

Mr. Antonov has moved out of his official residence in a historic mansion near the White House and now lives at the embassy, ​​according to people who speak to him. He is an experienced diplomat who spent years negotiating arms control agreements with American counterparts in Geneva. But he also served as deputy defense minister when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and was hit by European Union sanctions.

He often complains about his limited contacts with Biden administration officials and members of Congress — Politico once called him “Lonely Anatoly‘ – as well as the protests and ‘hooliganism’ outside the gates of his embassy.

Protests are routine, with anti-Putin chants and broadcasts of the Ukrainian national anthem with supportive horns from passing cars. Houses across the street are decorated with Ukrainian flags and anti-Russian slogans. Neighbors shout “Slava Ukraini!” (long live Ukraine) to Russians coming and going.

Bob Stowers, a local resident, said that on his daily walk past the embassy, ​​he stops at each of the six security cameras and holds up a news article about imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “It makes me feel a little better,” he said.

Sometimes things get more serious: Neighborhood residents complain that Wisconsin Avenue, the main thoroughfare that runs past the embassy, ​​is occasionally closed off by Secret Service police investigating bomb threats — as many as 10 since the invasion, according to one estimate. neighbour, although some believe the Russians are exaggerating threats to silence protesters. (An explosive ordnance disposal squad was once called to investigate a papier-mache washing machine left in the embassy driveway; it turned out to be an innocuous symbol of consumer goods looted by Russian troops.)

An unofficial street sign at the end of the embassy driveway proclaims it to be “Zelensky Way”. Protesters, including Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, have planted sunflowers, Ukraine’s national flower, in the grass along the sidewalk. Neighbors say the flowers were torn up overnight.

However, what seems to anger Mr. Antonov the most is the FBI’s attempts to recruit spies into his midst.

“In short, our embassy operates in a hostile environment,” Mr. Antonov said told the Russian news service Tass last year. “U.S. security agents loiter at the Russian embassy handing out CIA and FBI phone numbers that can be called to establish contact.” (After initially saying Mr. Antonov might be available for an interview, the embassy stopped responding to questions for this article.)

While it is unclear whether business cards were actually presented, the FBI is not trying to hide its efforts to recruit Russians from behind the embassy gates. The agency publicly released a video this year encouraging Russian diplomats who may be against the war to get in touch. The video opens with an image of the Russian embassy before showing a bus and subway ride through the city to the doors of FBI headquarters.

“You can walk into any FBI field office and say you want to change the future,” the video assures would-be spies.

The FBI would not comment on Mr. Antonov’s claims about agents handing out business cards, but a spokesman said the agency “seeks information from members of every community of interest in an effort to counter threats to our national security.”

Nor did the bureau want to answer questions about the mysterious house across the street from the embassy. The residents are rarely seen and the curtains are always drawn, even though the lights are usually on at night. Many neighbors assume the house is manned by FBI agents keeping tabs on the Russians, a theory not exactly discouraged by the fact that a street-level Google Maps image of the house has been blurred.

The Russians have cause for paranoia. Shortly after beginning construction on the embassy in 1977, the FBI and National Security Agency began digging a secret tunnel under the complex in an attempt to tap communications. But the project had to be halted after it was exposed by Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who was arrested in 2001 for selling American secrets to Moscow. (Mr. Hanssen died in June.)

Douglas London, a Russian-speaking former CIA operative and the author of a recent book on espionage recruitment, said it would be difficult but not impossible to find Russians in the embassy willing to cooperate with the United States.

“If you’re a Russian official sent to the US, they’ve put extra vetting on you,” said Mr. London. “Nevertheless, some of our best assets over the years have been Russian officials in the US who have volunteered to help us. I think Putin should be concerned about his Russians here.”

Mr. Antonov even claims that he was personally recruited. Last June, he told Russian state television that he had received a letter from the foreign ministry asking him to “denounce my motherland and condemn the actions of the Russian president.” according to Tass.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the alleged letter.

People who know Mr. Antonov call him an unlikely dissident. He is not a fanatical ideologue, they say, but he is also unfailingly loyal to the Kremlin. Some Westerners who have dealt with him describe him as cordial and even sympathetic. But he is also capable of caustic monologues; days before his country invaded Ukraine, Mr. Antonov insisted that there would be no war.

Despite the poisonous political cloud that surrounds him in many circles, Mr. Antonov tries to maintain some normal diplomatic habits. He receives fellow diplomats at his residence and greets them with caviar, fine wine, vodka and what guests describe as exquisite food, though he grumbles about losing his beloved chef, thanks to three-year US visa limits on Russians.

He hosts social events, including a December holiday reception for the news media, which is mostly attended by non-American journalists, according to people who were there. Those present were given a thick magazine about Russia’s heroic stand against the Nazis in Stalingrad.

At his residence in May, Mr. Antonov hosted a “Russia-Africa Unity Night,” underlining the Kremlin’s ties to many countries on the continent. Sleek sedans lined up outside, with diplomatic license plates denoting visitors from Egypt, Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea and Morocco, among others.

(A New York Times reporter who asked to attend the event received a formal email invitation — then received a follow-up message calling the invitation “no longer valid,” with no further explanation.)

Mr. Antonov may lament life in Washington, but for Americans in Moscow, it’s much worse, US officials say.

Protests are common there outside the US embassy, ​​although officials believe that unlike in Washington, they are organized by the host country government. American diplomats are constantly followed around the city by Russian security agents and sometimes intimidated. On the day in January that the newly confirmed U.S. ambassador, Lynne M. Tracy, first arrived at her office, the power mysteriously went out.

A former senior U.S. official recalled a recent incident where someone taped a giant letter Z to the car roof of a U.S. diplomat who was in a grocery store. State television later broadcast drone footage of the car entering the US embassy, ​​the former official said.

Last June, the city of Moscow renamed the plot around the US embassy give a new address: 1 Square of the Donetsk People’s Republic. (The name refers to the unrecognized Russian-installed government of an occupied eastern Ukrainian province.)

The Russians also have their projectors and have beamed images of the carnage of US wars in Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan to a building across from the US embassy.

As the war in Ukraine continues, it appears that this will not abate anytime soon. Mr. Wittes, for example, is deeply invested. “It took a lot of energy, a lot of money and a lot of experimentation” to perfect his light shows, he says. In addition, he said, “it makes Ukrainians happy.”