How Cold War spy expulsions are returning

As Germany, Sweden and Poland expel Russian diplomats in retaliation for Moscow showing the door to their officials over support for Putin critic Alexei Navalny, we look back at the long history of tit-for-tat expulsions between the Kremlin and the West.

Britain expels 105 Soviet diplomats and officials in September 1971 after Moscow refuses to clarify the activities of 440 of its citizens in Britain. Two weeks later Moscow kicks out 18 Britons.

Paris throws out 47 Soviet diplomats in April 1983 in the midst of the so-called "Farewell Affair" involving Soviet double agent Vladimir Vetrov, who passed the identities of Soviet spies to the French.

The Caribbean island kicks out 49 Soviet diplomats in November 1983 shortly after the United States invades following a coup.

Moscow and London engage in a six-day face-off after the KGB's London station chief Oleg Gordievsky defects in September 1985, with 31 officials kicked out on each side.

In late 1986 the US under Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union carry out tit-for-tat expulsions over several weeks.

In mid-September Washington demands the departure of 25 members of the Soviet mission at the United Nations and Moscow replies by expelling five American diplomats.

A month later Washington expels 55 more Soviet diplomats. Five are suspected of spying and the remainder leave as part of Washington's decision to reduce the number of Soviet personnel in the US.

Moscow responds by expelling five US diplomats and withdrawing all Soviet citizens from US missions in the country.

Two years later Canada expels, or declares personae non gratae, 19 Soviet personnel. Moscow takes similar measures against 13 Canadian diplomats.

Just over a year after former KGB officer Vladimir Putin comes to power in Moscow, Washington throws out 50 Russian diplomats in March 2001, in the biggest spy scandal since the end of the Cold War.

The move follows the arrest of Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence expert who spied for Moscow for 15 years.

Russia retaliates by expelling a similar number of Americans.

Britain expels four Russian diplomats and hits Moscow with visa restrictions in July 2007 after it refused to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the main suspect in the murder of ex-Russian agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in London in 2006 with the radioactive substance polonium-210.

Barack Obama expels 35 Russian intelligence operatives after intelligence agencies accuse Moscow of meddling in the US presidential election of 2016, which brought Donald Trump to the White House.

Putin rules out retaliation. But when relations do not improve under Trump the sanctions war resumes, with the two countries reducing the number of diplomats in each others capitals.

The poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent in England sparks a historic wave of expulsions between London and its western allies and Moscow in March 2018.

Russia denies involvement but some 300 diplomats are sent home in subsequent tit-for-tat expulsions. The US imposes economic sanctions.

Slovakia expels three Russian diplomats in August 2020 for "a serious crime", with local media reporting a possible link with the killing of a Chechen rebel in a Berlin park in 2019. Moscow expels three Slovakian diplomats in reply.

Several days earlier Norwegian and Austrian diplomats had been declared unwelcome in Russia after Oslo and Vienna expelled Russian diplomats for spying.