Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
|||
| State level | bilateral | ||
| Position of the authority | Embassy | ||
| Supervisory authority (s) | Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation | ||
| Headquarters |
 Washington, DC
|
||
| ambassador | Sergei Ivanovich Kislyak | ||
The Russian Embassy in Washington, DC is the headquarters of the Russian Federation's diplomatic mission in the United States of America . It is located at Boris Nemtsov Plaza on Mount Altoin on Wisconsin Avenue, northwest Washington, DC .
building
The old building of the Russian Embassy on 1125th 16th Street, NW was built in 1912 for entrepreneur and inventor George Pullman . It was one of the most expensive three-story buildings in Washington at the time; it cost $ 360,000 to build. However, Pullman never lived in the building himself. Just one year after its completion, the Russian heir to the throne, Nicholas II , bought the building for 350,000 US dollars.
According to a treaty of 1972, the United States gave the Soviet Union the property for the embassy for 85 years; the same procedure was reversed for the property for the US embassy in Moscow .
In 1994, the Russian Diplomatic Mission officially moved to 2650 Wisconsin Avenue, NW
Near the old embassy is St. Nicholas Cathedral at 3500 Massachusetts Avenue, NW of the Orthodox Church in America .
history
The National Security Agency codenamed "Monopoly" launched an espionage campaign in the 1980s to obtain information from the Soviet embassy. The project coincided with a period in which the adversaries, the USA and the USSR, had been fighting over mutual eavesdropping attacks on their embassies in Moscow and Washington. The dispute escalated after US embassy staff discovered that the new building for the American embassy in Moscow was almost entirely equipped with wiretapping devices by the Russian KGB. The KGB had also dug a tunnel into the basement of the embassy to "maintain" the facilities.
In Washington, a tunnel was dug from a building near the embassy to an outbuilding of the embassy in order to install eavesdropping devices and sensors. The action was betrayed to the GRU by Robert Hanssen .
In 2001 the New York Times reported on the case. One day after the article was published, according to Interfax, the chargé d'affaires of the US embassy in Moscow was called to the Russian Foreign Ministry to provide information about this process.
In 2015, on the anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II, the Russian Embassy in Washington awarded 5000 medals to surviving Soviet citizens in the United States. On Elbe Day , April 24, 2011, after a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, medals were awarded to Soviet citizens who had been soldiers, workers on the home front, survivors of the siege of Leningrad or survivors of concentration camps.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Ekaterina Komarova: Russia's footprints through Washington . In: Russia Beyond The Headlines . November 5, 2014 ( rbth.com [accessed August 22, 2017]).
- ^ A b SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg Germany: Espionage: Moscow wants to clear up the embassy tunnel - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Politics. Retrieved August 21, 2017 .
- ↑ architectofthecapita: Tunneling Under the Russian Embassy, August 4, 2016. Retrieved October 24, 2017
- ^ Decades After Cold War's End, US-Russia Espionage Rivalry Evolves . In: NPR.org . ( npr.org [accessed August 21, 2017]).
- ↑ Olga Denisova: Russian Embassy in US to present medals to WWII veterans . In: Russia Beyond The Headlines . April 23, 2015 ( rbth.com [accessed August 21, 2017]).
Coordinates: 38 ° 55 '28 " N , 77 ° 4' 29" W.