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No decision yet to call NATO-Russia Council meeting — diplomat

The diplomat said the Russia-NATO Council’s work has not been formally interrupted, but no NRC meetings have been called since June, 2014

MOSCOW, April 1. /TASS/. No decision to convene a regular meeting of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) has been made yet, the work on this issue continues, Russia’s Permanent Representative to NATO Alexander Grushko told the Izvestia newspaper in an interview published on Friday.

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"The work on convening a regular NRC meeting is underway, but the decision has not been made yet", he said.

The diplomat said the Russia-NATO Council’s work has not been formally interrupted, but no NRC meetings have been called since June, 2014.

On December 2, 2015, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the organization decided to resume the Council’s work. On February 13, at the Munich security conference, Stoltenberg said that he discussed the possibility of the NATO-Russia Council work resumption with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. However, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov later said that the Council meetings needed an agenda of mutual interest, but the sides had not reached an agreement on this issue. "We are working on the agenda for a possible meeting of the Russia-NATO Council at an ambassadorial level," he said. "We will not agree to meet if there is no mutually acceptable agenda of issues that are of interest not only for some NATO members but are of interest for us too. The issue has not yet been agreed, so, it is too early to speak about the dates,"

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