Russian embassy had to be stopped
Kremlin fury over Australia’s barring it from building a new Russian embassy alongside Parliament House in Canberra is no surprise. But Vladimir Putin is wrong if he thinks that reading the riot act to our ambassador in Moscow, Graeme Meehan, at the weekend, while labelling the Albanese government’s move “Russophobic hysteria” and threatening “retaliatory measures” is going to change things. As Anthony Albanese told parliament on Thursday, the decision to cancel Russia’s lease on the site “was taken in the national security interests of Australia”. The government had “very clear security advice as to the risk presented by a new Russian presence”.
Given Russia’s record for espionage and thinly disguised cyber attacks, the decision – hastily enacted into law with opposition support – was right. Ellen Whinnett’s report on Monday linking Russia to cyber “hacktivists” who attacked Australian organisations in a protest at the Melbourne Fashion Festival is the latest in a series of outrages. CyberCX said it believed a group calling itself Anonymous Sudan, which launched an attack over a dress at the fashion festival, was not a genuine protest set-up but part of a Russian-affiliated campaign called #opAustralia that in late March attacked 24 Australian hospitals and airports, disrupting them and shutting down websites by overwhelming them with traffic.
In February, there were reports that Australia had quietly expelled a Russian spy ring whose members were posing as diplomats attached to the country’s embassy, as well as other operatives using deep-cover identities. Days before that disclosure, ASIO, without mentioning Russia, said it had “detected and disrupted major spy networks”. Russia, in reacting to the Australian move, made the extraordinary claim that cancelling the lease was a violation of international law – regardless of its own breaches in Ukraine and its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
After meeting Mr Meehan, the Russian foreign ministry said “bilateral relations, thanks to the efforts of Canberra, are at an all-time low”. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke of Australia “continuing to zealously move forward as one of the authors of anti-Russia hysteria, which is rippling across the collective West … if issues arise which require reciprocity from us, we will behave accordingly”. Such threats deserve to be treated with contempt. Whatever the Kremlin was planning at its new embassy, it is vital to ensure it is not being done at the existing embassy in the suburb of Griffith.