WASHINGTON — On a heat June evening, Benjamin Wittes was seated at a card desk throughout the road from the Russian Embassy in Washington, kicking off his gentle present.
Assembled round him was a sprawl of wires and gear, together with a laptop computer and two highly effective gentle projectors. One in all them was beaming an enormous blue and yellow Ukrainian flag onto the embassy’s white facade.
That was only the start. “We’ve obtained a bit essay we’re going to venture, line by line, in three languages,” stated Mr. Wittes, a distinguished nationwide safety legislation professional. “It’s about stolen youngsters.” By the top of the evening, he was beaming a Ukrainian-language profanity about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia onto the towering embassy construction.
Mr. Wittes and his mates have been lighting up the embassy as soon as each few weeks because the struggle in Ukraine started final 12 months. It’s clearly getting underneath the Russians’ pores and skin. On this evening, the Russians have been making an attempt to blot out his projections with ones of their very own, together with two big white Z’s — a nationalist Russian image of the struggle effort.
As soon as, 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 thousands and thousands of instances 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 highlight wars with us,” Mr. Wittes stated. “It’s actually fairly juvenile.”
Additionally it is the unusual new regular round Russia’s most important diplomatic outpost in the USA, a scene of near-constant protests, spy video games and normal weirdness as essentially the most hostile relations in a long time between the USA and Russia play out within the coronary heart of Washington. 1000’s of miles from the entrance in Ukraine, the embassy compound has change into a battle zone of its personal.
