West Losing Its ‘Eyes and Ears’ in Russia with Consulate Closures

West Losing Its ‘Eyes and Ears’ in Russia with Consulate Closures

Executive Summary:

• Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine, Western countries have closed almost two dozen Russian consulates in protest against Moscow’s actions. The Russian government has responded by closing an equal number of Western consulates in Russia.
• That has complicated consular work on both sides, but it has had more serious consequences for the West because it means the West “knows ever less about Russia” and is again increasingly Moscow-centric in its evaluation.
• At the same time, it has freed up a group of experienced cadres Moscow is using to dramatically expand its diplomatic presence in Africa and Asia, where it has opened nine new embassies and seven consulates in recent months—a new challenge for the West.

Since Russia illegally occupied Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and launched the full-scale invasion against Ukraine in 2022, Western countries have closed almost two dozen Russian consulates. These closures were in protest against the war and for conduct incompatible with the status of diplomats—a euphemism for espionage and subversive activities. In response, Moscow has closed a similar number of Western consulates in Russian cities outside the capital, the latest iteration of the old Cold War saying in the West that “they send us spies and we treat them like diplomats while we send them diplomats and they treat them like spies” (see EDM, May 29, 2025; Izvestiya, February 11). Russia’s actions are having two more profound consequences than the Western moves. On the one hand, as Polish diplomat Grzegorz Ślubowski says, the West “knows ever less about Russia,” especially outside the capital, because it has lost its “eyes and ears” and is once again becoming ever more Moscow-centric in its analysis of Russian developments. This trend is leading to misconceptions and policy errors (Vot-Tak, February 20). On the other hand, the closing of Russian consulates in Western countries has given Moscow a reserve of experienced operatives who have helped the Russian Federation to expand its diplomatic presence in Africa and Asia in recent months and to announce plans for further growth in the coming year (Izvestiya, February 11).

Consulates perform several important functions. This makes them tempting targets for closure in the event of a deterioration in diplomatic relations between countries. In today’s world, they are often used as a kind of diplomatic “coin of the realm” to signal such changes. At the same time, however, they carry out a variety of important services. They help their own citizens who find themselves in difficult situations with local officialdom and help the citizens of the host country with visas and information. They also serve as an important symbol of outside interest to the people of the regions and cities where they are located. They gather information about developments outside the capital, an especially important function in large and diverse countries such as the United States and the Russian Federation, or in places where a country has particular interests in regions distant from the capital (Window on Eurasia, August 11, 2023). Soviet and Russian consulates have historically gone much further, engaging in both espionage and subversive activities, a pattern that makes them especially appropriate targets for closure when relations between Moscow and the West sour (see EDM, July 22, 2025).

Of these various functions, the consulates’ role in gathering information has received the least attention. This pattern makes a recent interview with Ślubowski, who headed the Polish consulate general in St. Petersburg from 2019 until it was closed in 2025, especially noteworthy (Vot-Tak, February 20). Between 2019 and early 2022, the former consul general says, it was possible to work “normally” in Russia’s northern capital. After Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion against Ukraine, however, Russian officials made that almost impossible. Nonetheless, the consulate continued to function as well as it could. Then, Warsaw decided to close a Russian consulate in Poland because there was compelling evidence linking Russian consular officials to a sabotage campaign. Moscow quickly responded by ordering the shutdown of Poland’s consulate in St. Petersburg (see EDM, July 29, 2025).

Ślubowski says that he does not think that “the closure of institutions [such as Russian consulates] has reduced the number of acts of sabotage in Poland.” Moscow simply has too many other means to carry out such actions. The consequences for Poland and for other countries subject to the inevitable tit-for-tat Russian response, however, have been increasingly unfortunate. “We are losing our eyes and ears in Russia,” he says. As of today, “there are no longer any Polish consulates in Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, or St. Petersburg. Only the embassy in Moscow remains” open, and Russian officialdom increasingly restricts its activities. Poland has less information about Russia than it had before, and increasingly, its information reflects developments in the capital rather than elsewhere in that country. As a result, Ślubowski continues, Poland and other Western countries underestimate the support Putin has for his war against Ukraine in Russian regions outside Moscow. By solely relying on Moscow interlocutors, they fail to recognize that while “the intelligentsia in Russia is anti-Putin, it is not anti-imperialist”—at least when it comes to the peoples still within the current borders of the Russian Federation (Vot-Tak, February 20). Instead, its members view the world “through the prism of great power ideas.” They are thus not the reliable partners that so many in the West place confidence in, a misconception that would be dispelled by more information from other parts of the Russian Federation, information that the consulates previously supplied.

Poland is not a special case in facing this information deficit. The tit-for-tat consulate closures have affected many countries in the West, including the United States, although the situation is more complicated. In 2018, the United States ordered the Russian consulate in Seattle to close, and Moscow responded by shuttering the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. Then, in 2020, after an impasse over diplomatic staffing, the United States closed its consulate in Vladivostok and suspended operations at its consulate in Yekaterinburg. Washington’s decision—because it targeted only U.S. institutions—did not lead to the closure of the remaining Russian consulates general in the United States in New York and Houston (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 20, 2020). Because governments tend to privilege diplomatic reporting as a source, the United States has suffered from an information loss similar to Poland’s. This loss may prove even greater, given that Washington has shuttered its own consulates far from Moscow but has not insisted that Moscow shutter its consulates in the United States.Perhaps the most immediately worrisome of these developments lies elsewhere. As a result of the closure of Russian consulates in Western countries, Moscow now has a reserve of some 300 experienced Russian diplomats that it is deploying to fill new diplomatic posts in Africa and Asia. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Moscow has expanded operations in many countries across those two regions and in Africa alone, it has opened nine new embassies and seven consulates in recent months, with another four slated to open this year (Izvestiya, February 11). It plans to open seven more embassies in Africa over the next two years (TASS, February 19). As a result of the consular war, Russia is now better placed to challenge the West, and the West is in a poorer position to understand what is going on in Russia.