MOSCOW, October 4. /TASS/. A recent decision by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to reinstate Russia into the global organization prompted Britain to stoke another anti-Russian smear campaign employing false accusations, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
Last month, the world’s governing anti-doping body announced its decision to reinstate the membership of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), which had been suspended since late 2015.
"As soon as Russia was reinstated into this sports organization, Great Britain, a trusted ally of the United States, which has been mercilessly drowning us, rushed for help," Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a news briefing in Moscow.
"A new wave of fake news, accusations and statements at different levels broke out," she said. "For instance, the British Foreign Office, which as it turns out now is specializing on security issues in the sphere of IT technologies, recently came up with a series of mind-boggling statements in their ‘highly-likely’ fashion on the involvement of the so-called GRU (Military Intelligence Service) in cyber attacks around the globe, even against WADA’s servers."
According to Zakharova, it is an obvious attempt to link the WADA situation to the already hyped-up cases of the Skripals, Salisbury and Amesbury.
"Without any analysis whatsoever we see that everything - the GRU, cyber spies, Kremlin hackers, WADA - has been poured and mixed into a single bottle of perfume, perhaps in a Nina Ricci bottle of perfume," the Russian diplomat stated. "It is simply a hellish perfume mixture."
"Our British colleagues have a rich imagination that knows no boundaries," Zakharova continued. "I wish I can have a look at the one making all this up. They are simply the ‘Andersens’ [Danish author of fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen]."
"Perhaps, they judge by themselves and describe what they themselves do, but this is totally unbecoming of a country, which claims to be playing one of the leading roles in the world," Zakharova added.