Football fans should “think twice” about travelling to the World Cup in Russia this summer as consular services are threatened by the diplomatic crisis between Vladimir Putin and the west, a senior White House official has warned.



The tournament kicks off on 14 June under the shadow of tit-for-tat expulsions and what some describe as a new cold war. Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, has suggested Putin will seek to exploit the showpiece in the way Adolf Hitler milked the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936.

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The White House official warned anyone planning to attend: “I would think twice because we won’t have the same ability to protect our citizens or even just dealing with the regular consular affairs when we’re there. And the other countries too. You would have that concern in any country about having the lack of consular support.”

England have qualified for the finals but the USA have not. The UK Foreign Office says consular teams were available around the clock to assist the 20,000 England fans who visited Brazil for the last World Cup in 2014. The provision of such support will be more difficult in Russia in the present climate, the senior Trump administration official said.

“If you get into any kind of difficulty there, we just won’t have the wherewithal. People have accidents. They get ill, they need to be medevacked out. We’re not suggesting that there are going to be some major sets of incidents but it’s just those larger concerns.

We won’t have the same ability to protect our citizens or even just dealing with the regular consular affairs

“We’re trying to work with the Russians on counter-terrorism as well. Any large sporting event, no matter what country now, is a target. And so we’ve now got less ability to be able to do that with the Russians than before because they’ve decimated the counterparts who would be dealing with this kind of thing, for the UK and the US.”

The official made clear that the US shares the UK conclusion that Russia was behind the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were found poisoned on 4 March.

A former army colonel sentenced to jail in Russia for spying for Britain, Skripal arrived in the UK as part of a spy swap in 2010. The official said: “I think for our colleagues who work on intelligence, that was a definite rupture of the rules of the game. When you do a spy swap, you don’t expect then that they will be bumped off later.”

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The official believes Moscow was trying to send a “very big signal, [a] chilling effect for anyone who might be contemplating similar action … or thinking about… criticising the government”.

The Trump administration reacted to the Skripal affair by expelling 60 Russians it accused of being spies under diplomatic cover; Moscow retaliated with diplomatic expulsions. Washington struck Putin’s inner circle on Friday, imposing sanctions on seven oligarchs. The White House also singled out Russia’s attempts to subvert western democracies. November’s midterm elections loom as another potential target.

The official said: “We’re extremely worried about the potential for their interfering, just like we’re finding out in Britain that perhaps they had some role in the Brexit campaign. The Spanish have already covered all kinds of evidence of how the Russians interfered [in the independence referendum in Catalonia]. We haven’t seen any diminution of attempts. The Department of Homeland Security has a very robust programme now working with state and local governments.”

If you’re going to get anything done with the Russians you have to talk to the guy on top

Another official said: “If you look back at 2016, around this time was when a lot of the initial penetrations occurred but the releases of John Podesta’s emails didn’t happen until later. So lack of any sort of overt activity now doesn’t mean that they’re not preparing the battleground for the months ahead.”

Donald Trump, however, has consistently and conspicuously declined to condemn Putin while deriding as a “hoax” and “witch-hunt” special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and links between Trump aides and Moscow.

The senior official said: “In the case of Russia, this is a very hierarchical society. If you’re going to get anything done with the Russians you have to talk to the guy on top and the president clearly – as we see with China and North Korea – understands that you have to be able to talk to the person on the very top.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vladimir Putin speaking with Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg last July. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Whereas Trump has taken a hard line with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, the official said, he has “always been extraordinarily careful and very respectful in the way that he’s talked about President Xi [Jinping] and he’s taken that approach with Putin. Putin is somebody who is quick to take an insult. He is the leader of a major nuclear superpower.

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“If you look at that in the past, back to Reagan and Gorbachev and other leaders, there’s always been a lot of care and attention paid to treating with due respect the leader on the other side, to be able to have that chance to sit down across the table. Now, we can criticise that approach. But this is a president who has actually adopted that really in his business dealings as well.”



Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said on Monday Trump and Putin had discussed meeting in the “not-too-distant future” at potential venues including the White House. The official continued: “Right now, the relationship between the US and Russia isn’t at rock bottom actually … but we’re in the midst of a forest fire so, sweeping things away, we may have to be starting from scratch.

“The UK government, as we understand, is going to go down pretty hard and heavy in some of the ways that we have as well, and we’re going to have to at some point sit down … and just thrash this out and figure out where we’re going to go from here. Theresa May’s going to have to do that too.”