Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia will expel 755 US diplomatic staff and could consider imposing additional measures against the United States as a response to new US sanctions.

Putin said in an interview televised on state television on Sunday that he ordered the move because he "thought it was the time to show that we're not going to leave that without an answer".

He, however, ruled out any immediate measure against the US. "I am against it as of today," Putin said in an interview with Vesti TV.

Moscow ordered the US on Friday to cut hundreds of diplomatic staff and said it would seize two US diplomatic properties after the US House of Representatives and the Senate approved new sanctions on Russia.

Russia said the US had until September 1 to reduce its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people, matching the number of Russian diplomats left in the US after Washington expelled 35 Russians in December.

New US sanctions were in part a response to conclusions by US intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election, and to further punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

OPINION: Wag the bear

Worsening relations

The Russian president reiterated that the US sanctions were a step to worsening relations between the two countries.

"We were waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, were holding out hope that the situation would change somehow. But it appears that even if it changes someday, it will not change soon," Putin said.

However, he said Moscow and Washington were achieving results on cooperation even "in this quite difficult situation".

The creation of the Southern de-escalation zone in Syria showed a concrete result of the joint work between the two countries, he said.

Earlier in the day, a top Russian diplomat warned of retaliation by Moscow.

Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov referred to a bill passed by Congress on Thursday to sanction his country as "weird and unacceptable", and said it was "the last straw".

"If the US side decides to move further towards ... deterioration, we will answer. We will respond in kind. We will ... retaliate," he said.

The US-Russia relationship has become increasingly strained in the wake of US intelligence agencies conclusion that the Kremlin interfered in the US election to discredit Hillary Clinton and help President Donald Trump win the election.

Russia has denied meddling in the US election.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the former director of the FBI, is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race and whether or not Trump's campaign may have colluded with Russia - an allegation that Trump and his associates have staunchly denied.</s>To flip between Russian news channels these days is to move between worlds.

Allegations that Moscow colluded with U.S. President Donald Trump during his 2016 run for office dominate the headlines on CNN and BBC. Each day, it seems, come new revelations about campaign contacts between members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle and a curious collection of Russian nationals, some of whom appear to have Kremlin ties.

But in Russia itself, the collusion allegations are secondary news, if they make the bulletins at all. The main Sunday-evening newscast on state-run television this week led with a report about a question-and-answer session that President Vladimir Putin held with Russian youth; the debate over how many times Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin met while attending the recent G20 summit in Germany was the seventh item, and followed a story about celebrities who attended a wedding in the southern city of Krasnodar.

Although Russia is central to the multipronged investigation into the 2016 election, there is a sense that the drama is a politicized one scripted entirely in Washington, and in which Moscow is being wrongly cast in the part of an almost silent bogeyman. Even many opponents of the Kremlin say that the U.S. media is making Mr. Putin and his security services out to be far more powerful than they really are. “I don’t think Trump won because of the Kremlin,” says Ilya Yashin, a prominent figure in the occasional street protests here against Mr. Putin. “There was Russian influence, but Trump won because he ran a better campaign.”

In his Sunday-evening broadcast, anchor Igor Kozhevin referred to the “anti-Russian fire” in the U.S., where, he said, anyone with a Russian name can be portrayed as a member of Russia’s secret services. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov played off such sentiments when he teased an interviewer on NBC last week with the possibility that Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump may have had even more meetings at the G20 than the public knows about. “Maybe,” he said, “they went to the bathroom together.”

Many Russians also shrug at the broader idea that one country may have meddled in the elections of another. Allegations that U.S. diplomats interfered, or backed one candidate over another, are part of almost every recent election campaign in both Russia and neighbouring Ukraine. “Americans seem to think their democracy is ideal, even sacred, and now the sanctity of America has been profaned by something that may or may not have happened,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who worked on Mr. Putin’s own presidential election campaigns in 2000 and 2004.

Mr. Pavlovsky, who has since come to oppose the Kremlin’s authoritarianism, has been accused of working to tilt the 2004 Ukrainian elections toward a pro-Moscow candidate. He says Russia and the U.S. were equally active meddlers.

Foreign-policy experts here believe that the Kremlin may indeed have been behind the hacking and leaking of Democratic National Committee e-mails, as U.S. intelligence services contend. But they say that that effort was intended more to embarrass and discredit Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee whom the Kremlin believed would win the election regardless. They never expected their handiwork to result in a President Trump.

Other allegations of Russian interference are regarded as far-fetched. The furor over which members of the Trump campaign met with outgoing Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak is greeted with an eye roll (“Aren’t ambassadors supposed to meet with people?” is a repeated phrase.) And talk that lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was representing the Kremlin when she met with Donald Trump Jr. and the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, gets a yawn.

But there are, nonetheless, serious concerns in Moscow political circles about the growing pressure that the scandal that has come to be known as “Russiagate” is putting on Mr. Trump and his administration. While Russia was initially enthusiastic about possible co-operation with the new President – Mr. Trump’s election win was famously greeted with applause in Russia’s parliament – there is now growing skepticism that the goodwill between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will result in better relations.

“Vladimir Putin is very positive toward Donald Trump because he promised to improve the relationship and he said positive things about Putin himself,” says Sergei Markov, a hawkish political strategist who occasionally advises the Kremlin. But Mr. Markov says that Russiagate is proof that the U.S. establishment will not allow Mr. Trump to implement his stated plan to improve ties with Russia. “He is not able to act. I think Vladimir Putin believes Donald Trump is not really the President of the United States.” At least not in the sense that Mr. Putin, as President of Russia, is the unquestioned authority here.

Hope is fading in Moscow that Mr. Trump will be able to lift the sanctions that the U.S. imposed (along with Canada and the European Union) over Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and its ongoing support for separatist militias in eastern Ukraine. Seeking to head off any sanctions relief that Mr. Trump may have been planning to offer Russia, the U.S. House and Senate on Thursday passed legislation that would require congressional approval for the President to lift sanctions at any point, while also introducing new sanctions targeting companies that co-operate with Russia’s energy industry. On Friday, the White House announced Mr. Trump will sign the legislation.

Earlier Friday, Russia demanded a reduction in the number of U.S. diplomats stationed in the country to 455, the same number of Russian diplomats currently stationed in the U.S. (The number of American diplomats currently in Russia is not publicly known.) Russia said that it would also restrict access to the U.S. embassy dacha outside Moscow, as well as to a building used by the embassy as a storage facility.

The Kremlin is anxious to see the return of two of its own diplomatic compounds – one a 45-acre estate on the eastern shore of Maryland, the other a 14-acre property on Long Island – that were seized in December by Mr. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, as retaliation for the suspected election interference; 35 Russian diplomats were also expelled.

Russia did not retaliate at the time, as the Kremlin hoped relations would improve once Mr. Trump took office. Friday’s move is a sign that Moscow is beginning to lose patience.

Western sanctions so far have primarily targeted the assets of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, as well as the country’s energy, finance and defence sectors. But Russia retaliated in 2014 with its own blanket ban on the import of Western agricultural goods, a measure that hit Russian grocery shelves hard. The value of the ruble also fell precipitously, and today the currency is worth just 55 per cent of its presanctions value.

Although Russia’s economy has started to show modest growth again after two years of painful contraction, the prospect of a long-term sanctions war – combined with persistently low oil prices – continues to darken the country’s economic horizon. An end to the economic conflict would undoubtedly be welcome, especially with Mr. Putin facing re-election next year.

But six months into Mr. Trump’s term, U.S. policy remains that Russia, if it wants to see any sanctions lifted, must end its support for separatists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine – support that Moscow denies providing. Other sanctions are connected to the annexation of Crimea, a move neither Mr. Putin nor any eventual successor is likely to undo. “Our bilateral relations are frozen,” says Valery Garbuzov, director of the state-funded Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies. “This is not war, but this is certainly not peace.”

Although the Trump administration appeared to align itself with Kremlin policy in Syria last week when it announced that it was ending U.S. support for rebels opposed to the regime of Moscow ally President Bashar al-Assad, many here believe the primary American interest was to absolve itself of the task of trying to resolve the six-year-old civil war.

Some analysts say that the Kremlin doesn’t yet know what to make of Mr. Trump, particularly given his habit of saying one thing and then promptly reversing himself – often via a bluntly worded tweet.

After a two-hour meeting at the G20 summit, Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump appeared to have reached an agreement to create what Mr. Trump called “an impenetrable Cyber Security unit” in a July 9 posting on his Twitter account. Following a storm of domestic criticism about his willingness to co-operate on cybersecurity with the country alleged to have hacked a U.S. election, Mr. Trump upended the deal in yet another tweet. “The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t …,” he wrote, just 13 hours after he had announced the pact.

It’s not the way that Moscow is used to handling relations with its nuclear rival. “Official Russian behaviour since Trump came to power is extremely cautious,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent foreign-policy commentator. “It seems the Russian leadership is starting to understand that the United States is much more unpredictable than anyone imagined it could be.”

Still, Mr. Trump remains uncommonly popular among ordinary Russians. A June poll by Pew Global Research found that only Russians and Israelis – among 37 countries where research was conducted – had “confidence in the U.S. President to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” Although Israelis had the highest level of confidence in Mr. Trump, at 56 per cent, that was only seven points higher than the share of Israelis who trusted Barack Obama when he was in office. The swing in Russia was far more pronounced, with 53 per cent of respondents expressing confidence in Mr. Trump, versus just 11 per cent who answered the same way when they had been asked about Mr. Obama.

That sentiment creates a conundrum for Mr. Putin and his advisers ahead of Russia’s own presidential elections next year, when Mr. Putin – who has been Russia’s president or prime minister since 1999 – is widely expected to seek another six-year term in the top office. Not only does Mr. Trump appear unable to deliver sanctions relief, he has also deprived official Moscow of a U.S. president to blame for all Russia’s own ills.

“For the Kremlin, it’s now harder to define the enemy. With Obama, it was more comfortable, and Hillary, too, would have given them a simple enemy to blame for the ways of the world. They could say that all the trouble and hardships in Russia are because of the Americans,” says Mr. Yashin, the opposition activist. “Now, we still have trouble and hardships, and it’s more difficult to explain them to the people. How can it be America’s fault when we have our guy in the White House?”

Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail’s senior international correspondent, based in London.

TRUMP, RUSSIA AND BEYOND: MORE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL</s>Story highlights Putin says 755 staff will be cut from US missions

The move follows a US Congress decision to impose fresh Russian sanctions

Moscow (CNN) President Vladimir Putin has hit back at new American sanctions by ordering the US to cut staff at its diplomatic mission by 755, in Moscow's most aggressive move against Washington since the final years of the Cold War.

Putin confirmed the move Sunday after the Foreign Ministry on Friday demanded the US cut staff numbers and announced a rash of other measures against Washington's missions.

The measures came after the US Congress passed a bill last week imposing fresh sanctions over Russia's meddling in the US' 2016 election. President Donald Trump has indicated he will sign the sanctions bill into law.

The response represents a sharp downturn in US-Russia relations after signs that Trump wanted to develop a new partnership with Moscow.

If Russian state media figures are correct, the forced reduction in staff numbers would gut the US mission. Putin was quoted as saying 755 out of "a thousand or so" employees would "have to stop their activities in the Russian Federation." That number would include diplomats and technical workers, he said.

Read More</s>Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia will expel 755 US diplomatic staff and could consider imposing additional measures against the United States as a response to new US sanctions. Putin said in an interview televised on state television on Sunday that he ordered the move because he “thought it was the time to show that…</s>Russian president Vladimir Putin announced Sunday that he was ordering 755 American diplomats out of that country.

In an interview with the state-owned broadcaster Russia 24, Putin said the move was in response to “illegal restrictions” imposed on the country by the United States. Putin claims that there are over a "thousand" American diplomatic employees in Russia, but "755 will have to cease their activities in the Russian Federation."

The Senate passed a new round of sanctions on Thursday aimed at punishing Moscow for interfering on the United States’ presidential election, among other things.

A U.S. State Department official declined to comment Putin's annoucement, telling NBC News: "It is our policy to not comment on the number of individuals serving at our missions abroad."</s>A diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Russia is now threatened after President Vladimir Putin ordered 755 U.S. diplomats to leave Russia. A total of 755 American diplomats will have to leave Russia as a result of Washington’s own policies, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, said on ABC’s This Week that his country’s retaliation over U.S. actions against Russia was “overdue.”

On Sunday, Putin sat with Russian television host, Vladimir Solovyov, in an exclusive interview with Rossiya 1 TV.

The Russian leader said they remained hopeful that something would change for the better.

“We’ve been waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, we had hopes that the situation would change. But it looks like, it’s not going to change in the near future… I decided that it is time for us to show that we will not leave anything unanswered.”

The Russian foreign ministry announced that Moscow told Washington to reduce the number of its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people. The events follow U.S. Congress’ approval of new sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

By September of 2017, the number of United States diplomatic service staff in Russia was officially ordered to be reduced in order to equal the number of Russian diplomats in the United States.

The American diplomatic mission carries over 1,200 personnel and “greatly exceeds” the number of Russia’s embassy staff in the United States.

Once the bill becomes law, Trump will be unable to ease sanctions against Russia, according to the Washington Examiner, unless he gets congressional approval to do so.

The legislation cleared through Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, coming in with a 98-2 vote in the Senate and 419-3 in the House.

The legislation is said to be a larger response to Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In December, thirty-five Russian diplomats were expelled from the United States under sanctions President Barack Obama imposed over Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, according to CNN. The sanctions also included the closure of two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used for intelligence purposes.</s>MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Sunday that 755 American diplomats would be expelled from Russia by Sept. 1, escalating the tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Although the expulsions had been announced on Friday, in response to the new law passed in Congress last week expanding sanctions against Russia, the president’s statement was the first to confirm the large number of American diplomats involved.

Speaking in a television interview on the Rossiya 1 network, Mr. Putin said that Russia’s patience in waiting for improved relations with the United States had worn out.

“We waited for quite some time that maybe something will change for the better, had such hope that the situation will somehow change, but, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon,” Mr. Putin said in the interview, according to Interfax news agency.</s>President Vladimir Putin said Russia will expel 755 U.S. diplomatic staff and could consider imposing additional measures against the United States as a response to new U.S. sanctions, although not for now.

Moscow ordered the United States on Friday to cut hundreds of diplomatic staff and said it would seize two U.S. diplomatic properties after the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate approved new sanctions on Russia.

Putin said in an interview with Vesti TV released on Sunday that 755 U.S. diplomatic and technical staff would have to leave Russia by Sept. 1.

READ MORE: Vladimir Putin says Russia will be forced to retaliate if U.S. passes new sanctions

“Because more than 1,000 workers – diplomats and support staff – were working and are still working in Russia, 755 must stop their activity in the Russian Federation,” he said.

New U.S. sanctions were in part a response to conclusions by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and to further punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Moscow said on Friday that the United States had until Sept. 1 to reduce its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people, matching the number of Russian diplomats left in the United States after Washington expelled 35 Russians in December.

WATCH: Russian Foreign Ministry releases statement advising U.S. of retaliation to sanctions

On Friday an official at the U.S. Embassy, who did not wish to be identified, said the Embassy employed around 1,100 diplomatic and support staff in Russia, including Russian and U.S. citizens.

Putin said that Russia could take more measures against the United States but not at the moment.

“I am against it as of today,” Putin said in the interview with Vesti TV.

READ MORE: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had undisclosed second meeting at G20

He repeated that the U.S. sanctions were a step to worsening relations between the two countries.

“We were waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, were holding out hope that the situation would change somehow. But it appears that even if it changes someday it will not change soon,” Putin said.

However, he said Moscow and Washington were achieving results on cooperation even “in this quite difficult situation.” The creation of the Southern de-escalation zone in Syria showed a concrete result of the joint work between the two countries, Putin said.</s>Moscow: Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that 755 US diplomats must leave his country, after Moscow announced it would expel American staff in retaliation for tough new sanctions from Washington.

The Russian foreign ministry had earlier demanded the US cut its diplomatic presence in Russia by September to 455—the same number Moscow has in the US.

“More than a thousand people were working and are still working” at the US embassy and consulates, Putin said in an interview with Rossia-24 television. “755 people must stop their activities in Russia.”</s>Russian President Vladimir Putin says 755 U.S. diplomats must leave Russia in comments that have come after Moscow directed Washington to reduce the size of its diplomatic staff in the country in an escalating row over sanctions.

 

 Speaking in an interview with Russian state television broadcast on July 30, Putin said that "more than a thousand people were working and are still working" at the U.S. embassy and consulates in Russia, and that "755 people must stop their activities in Russia."

 

 Moscow ordered the reduction in U.S. diplomatic staff after U.S. lawmakers passed a bill that would impose additional sanctions on Russia and sent it to President Donald Trump for his signature.

 

 The Russian Foreign Ministry said the sanctions legislation confirmed what it called the "extreme aggression" of the United States in international affairs.

 

 Putin's announcement came two days after the White House said Trump would sign the bill, which would require him to seek congressional approval in order to ease sanctions against Moscow.

 

 The Russian Foreign Ministry had previously said that Washington must reduce its diplomatic staff to 455 people by September 1.

 

 Putin said in the July 30 interview that the reduced U.S. diplomatic presence would be "quite painful."

Based on reporting by TASS, AFP, and Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin expels 755 U.S. diplomats in response to new sanctions imposed by the United States.