The State Department has reportedly formally protested to the Russian government related to reports that a pair of US diplomats were drugged last year during a UN conference in St. Petersberg, Russia. The department said they’d raised the concern “at the highest levels.”
The claim is related to a story on the US government-funded Radio Free Europe website. Radio Free Europe was created wholly to broadcast anti-Russian propaganda during the Cold War, and has continued to some extent with that task. They have a history of claims of dubious validity.
The story in question claimed two diplomats were slipped what is believed to be a “date rape drug” at a bar in their hotel. The US government concedes they were unable to acquire any evidence that this ever happened, having no proper tissue samples for the putative victims. Russian officials insisted there was nothing they could do without at least some evidence.
Which somehow has become a diplomatic incident, almost a year after it happened, as tensions are now rising with Russia, and the Russian government’s withdrawal from nuclear agreements is somehow being tangentially tied to the putative drugging of two low-ranking US diplomatic officials at an anti-corruption meeting, for which no good evidence exists that anything even happened, let alone that it was the Russian government’s doing.
