United States and Russia have mutually agreed to reinstate the usual functioning of their diplomatic missions, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reported on Tuesday after top-level talks in Saudi Arabia.
The action represents a major breakthrough in de-escalating the tensions between the two countries, especially after decades of diplomatic limitations placed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other geopolitical conflicts. The Riyadh negotiations, launched on President Donald Trump’s instruction last month, were part of an overall effort to negotiate a termination of the war in Ukraine.
Rubio said both countries committed to sending teams of officials with the mission of immediately restoring the complete operations of their respective embassies. Diplomatic ties between Russia and the US have been strained for more than a decade, with each expelling diplomats and limiting new ones, keeping their missions critically short-staffed.
These efforts have seriously undercut our capacity to function well in Moscow, and Russia has analogous problems in Washington,” Rubio explained to the Associated Press. He stressed the necessity of fully functioning embassies to have clear communication between the two countries but avoided releasing certain details of the restoration process.
The US State Department is yet to issue more information regarding the fate of its missions in Russia. Russia’s Foreign Ministry, however, affirmed that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had expressed himself over Russia’s diplomatic presence in the US during an earlier call with Rubio.
Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, US officials had already quoted challenges in sustaining embassy operations because of Moscow’s personnel limitations, which resulted in the shutdown of US consulates in Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg. The new agreement implies a potential turn toward restoring diplomatic channels and easing tensions.
