WASHINGTON — On a heat June night time, Benjamin Wittes was seated at a card desk throughout the road from the Russian Embassy in Washington, kicking off his mild present.
Assembled round him was a sprawl of wires and tools, together with a laptop computer and two highly effective mild projectors. One of them was beaming a large blue and yellow Ukrainian flag onto the embassy’s white facade.
That was just the start. “We’ve got a little essay we’re going to project, line by line, in three languages,” mentioned Mr. Wittes, a distinguished nationwide safety regulation skilled. “It’s about stolen children.” By the tip of the night time, he was beaming a Ukrainian-language profanity about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia onto the towering embassy construction.
Mr. Wittes and his pals have been lighting up the embassy as soon as each few weeks because the battle in Ukraine started final 12 months. It is clearly getting beneath the Russians’ pores and skin. On this night time, the Russians have been attempting to blot out his projections with ones of their very own, together with two big white Z’s — a nationalist Russian image of the battle effort.
Once, final spring, a Russian highlight chased a Ukrainian flag throughout the embassy facade in a slapstick cat-and-mouse sport that has since been watched tens of millions of occasions on-line. In April, a burly man in denims and a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt emerged from the embassy and silently obstructed Mr. Wittes’s projectors with an open umbrella in every hand.
“They get into spotlight wars with us,” Mr. Wittes mentioned. “It’s really quite juvenile.”
It can also be the unusual new regular round Russia’s primary diplomatic outpost within the United States, a scene of near-constant protests, spy video games and basic weirdness as probably the most hostile relations in a long time between the United States and Russia play out within the coronary heart of Washington. Thousands of miles from the entrance in Ukraine, the embassy compound has grow to be a battle zone of its personal.
Source: www.nytimes.com