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Russian security, countermeasures, Secret Service: A very D.C. protest

2023-09-22 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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The sunflowers persisted this summer — soaring above six feet, their fat, golden heads covered in fuzzy honeybees, oblivious to past cruelty.

“The first year they planted fully grown ones,” said Connor O’Brien, one of the sunflower keepers. “They got ripped up and torn to shreds. I’m not accusing the Russians, I have no evidence. But.”

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The small, urban field is planted in tree boxes across the street from the Russian Embassy in D.C., where an entire block of residents has been in a slow-burn cold war with the diplomats behind the heavily guarded, wrought iron security gates since the country invaded Ukraine.

This involves surveillance cameras, countermeasures, negotiations and confrontations. Hostilities have escalated between embassy staff and a neighbor with a projector, at times drawing a hulk of a human who stands in silence and is known to the neighborhood simply as “Umbrella Man.” The Secret Service shows up.

The people of D.C. are waging their own war against Russia, in miniature, one middle finger at a time.

On the day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington to ask Congress for continuing financial support after 19 months of conflict, passersby stopped and took sunflower selfies at the protest garden. It happens every day.

“Some people might know what sunflowers mean,” said O’Brien, a Washington consultant who named the garden Polonne after the small Ukrainian town where he had worked as a Peace Corps English teacher. “It’s important that the D.C. community shows that we are standing behind Ukraine.”

Zelensky told senators that what Ukraine needs most right now is air defense not only to help the military, but to also protect the country’s energy and water systems. The Ukrainian counteroffensive has been grinding forward, and on Thursday the country announced that it had targeted a Russian air base overnight in Crimea, the land Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

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The Ukrainian community is supporting the neighborhood protest, gathering at each of the plantings and watching their ambassador, Oksana Markarova, shove her hands into the earth to plant replacements for the ones that had been uprooted and destroyed. The sunflowers have their own Instagram account.

Benjamin Wittes, the projection man, explained the sustained, aggressive gardening, despite the ongoing vandalism.

“Every sunflower we plant outside the embassy is likely to be destroyed. That is the point,” Wittes said. “There are the people who plant. There are people who destroy what is planted. There are people who come back and plant after the destruction. We cannot prevent evil. But we can always be the people who rebuild after evil.”

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Every house on that block across the street has a display — Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag in the windows, signs, posters. There’s a teddy bear with a sign urging Russians to defect. One homeowner even painted his entire fence in the nation’s colors.

Drew Cooper’s paint job isn’t precise. Some online critics have pointed this out.

But that’s because he has to repaint it over and over again.

Over the equal blue and yellow fields (he worked with the local paint store to get the colors just right), vandals have scrawled big, fat Zs — which symbolize support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Quickly, before he heads to work at his law office, Cooper brings out the cans of blue and yellow paint and slaps another coat over the pro-Russian graffiti.

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Cooper feels a sense of duty in using his “prime canvas” — about 40 feet of fencing — to telegraph a message to the Russians working across the street.

“Every time you’re going to look out your east side,” he imagines telling them, “you’re going to see this.”

They’ve added prints of art pieces done by Nikita Titov, a beloved Ukrainian artist, with surveillance cameras on them. Nearly every print has been ripped down, the vandals looking straight into the lens. None have been identified, Wittes said.

Some nights, the neighbors gather for the light show.

It takes a few projectors to paint the tall and thick main building rising from the embassy compound with their colorful, lit-up messages. There’s the Ukrainian flag, protest poems and essays, political art, and, frequently, the FBI and CIA contact numbers for any Russians who want to defect.

“They’re always trying to interfere with the projections using countermeasures,” said Wittes, who worked in The Washington Post’s editorial section a decade ago and is now with a Washington think tank.

He’s not a lighting expert but quickly had to learn the complicated art of casting large projections over a distance after he suggested it on social media and got a rousing response. He sets up his production across Wisconsin Avenue, a courtesy to make it easier on the Secret Service officers who are usually called in to help manage the spectacles.

Every night the projectors are fired up, the embassy staff casts their own spotlights on the projections, trying to obscure the messages. They’ve also created projections in the shape of that “Z.”

“Last spring, we had Umbrella Man,” Wittes said. (That interaction, and many others, is posted on YouTube.) “This big guy comes from across the street and tries to block the projections with an umbrella. He’s right in front of the projectors. Standing there for about 45 minutes. He doesn’t speak any English.” They’ve been unable to verify whether he’s an embassy employee.

So the neighbors took countermeasures of their own.

“Someone went and got a ladder,” he said.

The most preposterous exchange came when Secret Service officers were dispatched with a message from the Russians.

“The Secret Service ended up doing these elaborate negotiations, talking through the gate, talking to me,” Wittes said. “Then the Russians would send back counterproposals.”

He told them he’d take down one of his projectors if they took down a spotlight.

“I took down one of mine and then they balked and reneged on the deal,” he said. “So we sat down there all night, until the sunlight washed away all our lights.”

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