Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the decision by Montenegro, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to close their airspace to prevent his plane from flying to Serbia was «unprecedented» but won’t affect good relations with Belgrade.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Photo: EPA-EFE/RUSSIAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS MINISTRY
Serbia’s neighbours Montenegro, North Macedonia and Bulgaria closed their air space to his plane, Sergei Lavrov told a press conference in Moscow that it won’t disrupt Russia’s good relations with Belgrade.
“Something unprecedented happened. A sovereign country has been deprived of its right to conduct a foreign policy. The international activities of Serbia, related to Russia, have been blocked,” Lavrov said.
Moscow’s top diplomat blamed the EU for the move, saying that it was not allowing Balkan countries to freely choose their partners
“NATO and EU want to turn the Balkans into a project of their own called ‘closed Balkans’,” Lavrov said in a reference to the Open Balkan cross-border economic project.
He added that “if a visit by a Russian foreign minister is being seen in the West as something close to a global threat, then by all accounts things within the West are pretty bad”.
Lavrov promised invite his Serbian counterpart Nikola Selakovic to visit Moscow because he was not able to travel to Belgrade.
North Macedonia, Montenegro and Bulgaria, all NATO countries and Serbia’s immediate neighbours, closed their airspace to an official plane that would have carried Lavrov to Belgrade on Monday.
The Kremlin described it as a “hostile” move, although Lavrov said that in retaliation, his country would not do anything “that can disrupt the relations between the people” of the three Balkan countries with Russia.
Russia’s RIA Novosti cited Russian diplomatic sources hinting at a possibility that the Bulgarian and Montenegrin ambassadors will be expelled from Moscow.
This would not affect North Macedonia as its ambassadorial seat in Moscow is empty. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, North Macedonia suspended its plan to send an ambassador there.
In Montenegro, the Foreign Ministry is expected to comment later on Monday, amid criticism from opposition parties.
The head of parliament’s international affairs committee, opposition MP Miodrag Lekic, warned that the government should be transparent in making decisions about the country’s foreign policy.
“The Montenegrin authorities should inform public whether they made this decision autonomously or in consultation with the European Union and NATO and in what modality,” Lekic said in a press release.
North Macedonia’s Foreign Ministry has only confirmed the ban on the flight, noting that the country introduced a ban on Russian planes on February 28, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, and that Lavrov is on the Western sanctions list due to the invasion.
Only the head of the small, pro-Kremlin Levica (Left) party in North Macedonia, Dimitar Apasiev criticised the government.
“If you banned the NATO flyovers who bombarded Belgrade [in 1999] in the same way you banned the flight of Russia’s Lavrov to Serbia, by now we would have been a respected country, not a vassal territory,” Apasiev wrote on Facebook.
In Bulgaria, the officials remained silent about the exact reason for the ban, leaving observers to assume that it was done because the country joined the ban on Russian aircraft as part of the EU sanctions imposed on the Kremlin.
Source link: balkaninsight.com
