UK ambassador summoned as Russia expels British diplomat on spy claims

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has announced the expulsion of a British diplomat who it said had been conducting reconnaissance and “subversive work” in the country, state-affiliated news agency Interfax reported on Tuesday.

The FSB said that Edward Pryor Wilkes, the second secretary of the political department of the British Embassy in Moscow, who replaced one of the six British intelligence officers expelled from Russia in September, had purposely given false information about himself when applying for permission to enter the country.

Wilkes’s activities “showed signs of reconnaissance and subversive work that threatened the security of the Russian Federation”, according to the FSB, which said that Wilkes had been stripped of his credentials and ordered to leave Russia within the next two weeks.

British Ambassador Nigel Casey has been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry, its spokesperson Maria Zakharova told state-owned news agency TASS, though the British authorities have not yet issued a comment on the incident.

In September, the Foreign Ministry stripped six British diplomats of their accreditation on the “on the basis of documents provided by the Russian FSB and as a response to numerous unfriendly steps by London”.

An unnamed FSB officer told state-owned TV news channel Russia-24 at the time that the diplomats had been accused of meeting with the staff of NGOs that had been deemed “foreign agents” by the Russian government, as well as with journalists from Novaya Gazeta.

The source said that the FSB had received documents “confirming London was helping to escalate the international military and political situation”, adding that since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Foreign Office’s Directorate of Eastern Europe and Central Asia had become little more than an intelligence outpost aimed at bringing about Russia’s defeat.