Nearly three years after foiling an audacious coup attempt, authorities in Montenegro on Thursday convicted 14 people—including two alleged Russian military intelligence agents in absentia—of participating in a plot to overthrow the government.
News of their jail sentences was widely lauded by Western governments, including a statement released Thursday from the U.S. State Department extolling the move as a “clear victory for the rule of law, laying bare Russia’s brazen attempt to undermine” Montenegro’s sovereignty.
But that U.S. statement went out by mistake, Foreign Policy has learned. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo opposed it, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with internal deliberations, who suggested it was because the secretary wanted to soften combative tones with Moscow ahead of his forthcoming visit to Russia.
“Since the thwarted Russian-backed coup attempt on Montenegro’s parliamentary election day in October 2016, Montenegro has taken important steps toward integrating with the Transatlantic family, most notably joining NATO in June 2017,” the statement said.
The statement was accidentally released on Thursday afternoon. Pompeo’s office directed the department to quash it, but the bureaucratic machinations were already set in motion. Shortly after it was released, it was quickly recalled and quietly taken down from the State Department website.
The minor blunder offers a glimpse into the precarious diplomatic line Pompeo must walk as he prepares to visit Russia next week to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. After the release last month of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections to tip the scales in now-President Donald Trump’s favor, both Trump and Pompeo have signaled they’re ready to kickstart a new phase in U.S.-Russia relations.
That's nice. Sounds like it's time for some deliverables from that 2016 "help."
By the way:
Montenegro, the tiny Southeastern European nation that gained independence from Serbia in 2006, defied heavy-handed Russian pressure in order to join NATO in 2017. The move struck a symbolic and political blow to Moscow’s wider efforts to wield influence over the Balkans.
A Montenegrin court on Thursday convicted 14 people, including two pro-Russian politicians and the two suspected Russian military intelligence operatives, on charges of attempted terrorism and creating criminal organizations in their aims to overthrow the government in 2016 and unravel the country’s bid to join NATO. The court said they plotted to take over the Montenegrin parliamentary building and kidnap Milo Djukanovic, Montenegro’s then-prime minister and current president, ahead of parliamentary elections in October 2016.
The two suspected Russian agents, Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov, were convicted in absentia. Their whereabouts are unknown.