The White House on Thursday announced a new set of sanctions on Russian entities and individuals as punishment for Russian hacking during the US election.
And here in all its glory is the first official Russian diplomatic response.
President Obama expels 35 🇷🇺 diplomats in Cold War deja vu. As everybody, incl 🇺🇸 people, will be glad to see the l… https://t.co/NY7IkFU6k3
Get it? It's a lame duck. Like Obama is right now. It's a joke.
The tiny baby duck picture was tweeted not from the Twitter account belonging to the Russian embassy in the US. Nope, this one came from the embassy in London.
A few minutes after this story originally went live, @RusEmbUSA tweeted this out, quoting Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
#Peskov: We will certainly response adequately and it will be determined in line with decisions adopted by Russian… https://t.co/DwWtv5kJ5K
And then the Russian embassy in Canada tweeted out this, which, not gonna lie, we had to look up the reference they were making.
Herostratus complex: scorched earth and wasteland as a legacy. https://t.co/8nDfMHbtPC
Per Wikipedia, "Herostratus — or Erostratus — was a 4th-century BC Greek arsonist, who sought notoriety by destroying one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. His acts then prompted the creation of a law forbidding anyone to mention his name. Nevertheless, his name has become a metonym for someone who commits a criminal act in order to become noted."
We're still hoping the original tweet is the beginning of a duck-based diplomacy salvo that will last into 2017.
