ATHENS — Just hours ahead of Greek Easter, the most important Greek religious holiday of the year, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman went on a Telegram offensive against Greece, assailing Athens for its expulsion of 12 Russian diplomats earlier this month. Bizarrely, she pinned the decision to do so on an American undersecretary of state, Victoria Nuland.The spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, correctly notes that Ms. Nuland was in Athens on April 6, the day the expulsions took place. “And if Nuland appears somewhere, then don’t expect good things from there,” Ms. Zakharova wrote. That snub appears to be a thinly veiled reference to Ms. Nuland’s former role as President Obama’s point person on Ukraine during that country’s Maidan Revolution in 2014. She and the former American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, were widely seen as encouraging the ouster of the elected but Kremlin-backed president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who was ultimately thrown out of office. During her April visit to Athens as part of a week-long tour that included stops in France and Germany as well as Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, Ms. Nuland met with both the Greek defense minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, and Mr. Pyatt, who currently serves as Washington’s ambassador to Athens. He is scheduled to leave the post next month.Ms. Zakharova read into the date of the explusions, April 6, a double coincidence — because it is the day when, in 1941, Nazi German troops attacked Greece. That, apparently, was enough for her to call out the timing of the diplomatic expulsions as deliberate: “What was it on the part of the American advisers, a coincidence or a devilishly accurate calculation?” she asked.Likely as not it was neither, and Greece is hardly the only country in Europe to have expelled a number of Russian diplomats and spies since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. France earlier this month ousted six Russians suspected of working as spies under diplomatic cover. Prior to that, Germany announced the expulsion of 40 Russian diplomats in response to the discovery of apparent mass graves and executed civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. It is not clear if Ms. Zakharova has lashed out at Paris and Berlin as she did at Athens, but leave it to one of Mr. Putin’s loyalists to dig in her heels even deeper. In a spectacularly distorted reference to the Greek Revolution of 1821, she said that the Greek state was liberated and re-created “thanks to the help of Russia.” Not to her discredit — there is already an ample supply of that — Ms. Zakharova also said that Russians “share the faith with the Greeks,” which is about as close as she came to wishing the NATO-member country of nearly 11 million people a happy Greek Easter. Although Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter this Sunday, in Greece the party’s already begun. This year’s Easter celebrations will go ahead with the fewest restrictions in place since the start of the pandemic. Those include mask and vaccination mandates at churches and many other shared indoor areas, but Good Friday saw exuberant processions of the Epitaph unfold outside churches in every corner of the country. Greece has been keenly following the war in Ukraine. Among the liturgies this weekend there will likely be prayerful thoughts for the victims of the brutal Russian siege of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city founded in part by Greeks and still home to a sizable ethnic Greek community. While Ms. Zakharova made no mention of Mariupol in her post, she did put forward that “Euro-Atlantic solidarity erases the past” and reminded the Greeks that Russia helped to put out fires in the Peloponnese last year. While the Greeks throw a proper party, they are also known to raise stubbornness to an art form. In other words, despite the Kremlin’s evident lament for all those “diplomats” dispatched back to Moscow, absent a viable ceasefire in Ukraine chances are slim any of them will be enjoying their Acropolis views again anytime soon.
