Escalated vandalism and confrontations with elderly protesters show no love lost between Russians and their North American host cities
Eggs. Tennis balls. Industrial-strength paint guns. Inside their North American embassies and consulates alike, Russia’s diplomatic staffs are grinding into an unseasonably hot fall.
Last Thursday was a darkly red-letter day in world history. Vladimir Putin chose to try to revive his crumbling war efforts with an Orwellian show at home – signing “annexation” papers on four Ukrainian territories in the largest attempted takeover of a sovereign state’s land in Europe since WWII.
While the illegal, point-of-a-gun referendums are accepted by nearly no one in the world, and Ukraine continues to rout the Russian army as it collapses from Kherson to Kharkiv, Putin did get a big splashy rock concert out of his domestic PR stunt.
Blatant illegality and international rejection of the sham annexation aside, it was also, eerily, an echoing one. As historian Dan Snow noted on Twitter: “Putin annexed parts of Ukraine 84 years to the day since Britain and France agreed to Hitler’s annexation of a similar proportion of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference. Pretty weird.”
Well, history rhymes, it’s true. But people really don’t like this particular tune, it seems. And they’re letting the Russians know, loud and clear, across the United States and Canada.
I first started writing about red paint protests at Russian embassies in the summer, documenting the phenomena back to the spring and the February invasion. At that time the epicentre seemed to be Eastern Europe, within Ukraine’s neighbour states and strongest allies. Some strong actions took place in Western Europe, too.
But seven months in, it’s the North Americans who are making their own showing.
The Canadians in Ottawa, of course, have been garnering international attention all over the place. They’ve been at the heart of the most intrigue-laden international incident and diplomatic scandal of all – the August event at Russia’s embassy in Ottawa in which embassy staff were caught red-handed vandalising a memorial to murdered Ukrainian children, and spray-painting Zs on city sidewalks.
The incident’s fallout led to calls for the most serious consequences from groups like the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and other supporters. The UCC has testified in Parliament about the incident, asking for the Russian diplomatic mission to be expelled from Canada, a declaration of Russia as a terrorist state, and suspension of Russian visas. So far nothing yet.
Such a lack of action is probably at the root of some angry Ottawa residents taking matters into their own hands in recent weeks: from a massive egging by a man screaming “get out of Canada,” who was then peacefully arrested, to a middle-of-the-night Molotov cocktail attempt caught on surveillance video.
And while most North American actions of art, protest, or mischief have centred on the embassies in Ottawa and Washington D.C., some of the consulates are now, too, becoming a part of the story.
US and Canadian consulates saw many thousands come out in protest upon the initial February invasion, but those in Toronto and Houston have remained relatively peaceful since. Not so now in Montreal or New York.
Indeed, a few weeks back Montreal finally notched its own diplomatic incident, matching its federal cousins in the Canadian capital.
Like Ottawa, Montreal has its fervent daily protesters at the Russian consulate, complete with waving Ukrainian flags, signs against war crimes, and the daily playing of both music and a horror soundtrack of gunfire meant to be distressing.
The situation turned ugly a few weeks back when 91-year-old protester Claude Fournier was assaulted by Russian consulate security, his speakers thrown to the ground. Yet since the incident, Fournier and his compatriots have stated clearly that they have no intention of stopping their daily visits.
With so much happening at their Canadian counterparts, it was only a matter of time before New Yorkers made an appearance in embassy news, too. And they did so – on the very night of Putin’s sham annexation – with a bang.
New York City’s Russian consulate sits in a grand old Manhattan mansion on East 91st Street. The former John Henry Hammond House was built as a gift to a banker upon his marriage to a distant Vanderbilt relation in 1901. Designed in Renaissance palazzo fin de siècle style, it’s as charming an Old New York style building to be found on the city’s uber-posh Upper East Side.
It’s just too bad for architectural historians that the Russians bought this gem, as it may likely never be the same.
At 1:30 a.m. on Thursday night, just hours after Putin’s Anschluss redux, the consulate was hit with a dramatic vandalism attack. Unlike in Ottawa and other European capitals’ embassies, the consulate has no fence at all; the building’s façade sits directly at sidewalk level. A surveillance video captured a hooded and masked man who managed to lay complete siege to the grand old mansion with an industrial-strength paint gun in just 45 seconds.
Another video on Friday saw workers attempting every possible chemical removal method they could muster, but to no avail. The building remains a shocking eyesore days later, its historic façade utterly annihilated in stories-high accusatory blood-red streaks. It is yet unclear how the damage may be repaired.
Indeed, this Manhattan attack is definitely the worst Russian embassy assault of the war yet in North America, visually and aesthetically speaking – maybe even in Europe too, considering the provenance of the building and its total state of disaster.
In both cases, “police are investigating”. As in Ottawa’s Molotov cocktail attack several weeks back, video shows a lone actor, but police have no suspects as of now.
And as in Ottawa’s escalated attacks, Russian government officials in both host countries and in Moscow are protesting that their embassies and consulates in North America aren’t being kept safe enough on hostile ground. They announced that they had asked for more police protection and not received it. The Canadian envoy in Moscow was called in and scolded in September. One might expect the Americans to receive similar treatment in the coming days – even as most Americans were expelled in April, and their embassy in Moscow now operates under emergency status only.
Such conflicts disappeared months ago in some European countries – those that simply expelled the Russian missions in their own cities back in the spring. Now it remains to be seen what the Russian embassies of North America will get first: the increased local police protection for which they’ve been asking, or the message that it’s time to pack it in. Time will tell.
