In application of European sanctions against Mr. Lavrov, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia and Montenegro closed their airspace to the plane which was to transport it to Belgrade.
Le Monde with AFP and Reuters
Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, denounced, on Monday, June 6, the decision of Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia and Montenegro, all three NATO member countries, close their air space to prevent him from going to Serbia.
“The inconceivable has happened,” said Lavrov, at an emergency online press conference. “We have deprived a sovereign state of its right to exercise its foreign policy,” he added, denouncing a “scandalous” measure. Mr. Lavrov had to go to Serbia for a two -day visit. He was supposed to meet in Belgrade Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, his foreign counterpart, Nikola Selakovic, and the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Porfirije.
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“If a visit to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs is perceived in the West as a planetary quasi-world, it apparently means that everything is going very badly there,” said Mr. Lavrov. He added that he invited Mr. Selakovic to go to Russia “as soon as possible”. “No one will be able to destroy our relations with Serbia,” said Lavrov.
Sergei Lavrov still said that Russia was not going to follow the example of its “Western partners”: “Regarding possible response, we are not going to do anything that risks complicating more the links between peoples. “
Dmitri Peskov, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, also reacted to the cancellation of this trip: “such acts hostile to our country are able to cause certain problems (…), but they cannot not prevent our diplomacy from continuing his work. “
For his part, Konstantin Kossatchev, the vice-president of the Federation Council, the upper room of the Russian Parliament, denounced a “NATO approach” directed “against Russia as a state and Serbia in As long as state “and claimed a” common and extremely severe “reaction” which would result “by practical, concrete actions”.
The ambiguous position of Serbia
The head of the Serbian government, Ana Brnabic, said on Sunday that the situation around this visit was “exceptionally complicated” due to the impossibility of overflighting certain countries. She had specified that the Serbian president himself worked on the organization of the visit.
In Belgrade, the Serbian Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin, expressed his misunderstanding. In a statement, he said: “A world in which diplomats cannot seek peace is a world in which there is no peace. Those who have prevented the arrival of Sergei Lavrov do not want peace, they Dreaming of defeating Russia. (…) Serbia is proud not to be part of anti -Russian hysteria, and the countries participating there will have time to be ashamed. “
Sergei Lavrov has been targeted since February 25, the next day at the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, by sanctions from the European Union, just like President Vladimir Putin. At the end of February, the head of Russian diplomacy, who was to participate in the UN Human Rights Council and in the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva, had already had to cancel his arrival in Switzerland due to the sanctions prohibiting him overflight of the European Union.