BUCHAREST, November 11. /TASS/. Russia’s embassy in Romania issued a commentary on Friday over the ‘inappropriate interpretation’ in the Romanian media of the words the Russian ambassador, Valery Kuzmin, said on November at a conference on promotion of business ties with the Russian Federation.
The conference was held in the city of Suceava.
A number of media, including the internet portal Karadeniz Press claimed Kuzmin had offered Romania to unite with neighboring Moldova or to hold a referendum on the issue.
"This is an inappropriate interpretation," the embassy said. "It might have surfaced out of a somewhat imprecise translation into Romanian or selective quoting of separate phrases plucked out of a broader context."
The commentary said the ambassador had paid special attention to the analysis of the illegal sanctions that the EU and some other countries had imposed on Russia. In this context he made emphasis on the fact the sanctions were illegitimate from the points of view of the UN Charter and the regulations of the World Trade Organization and, on top of that, they ignored the expression of will by the people of Crimea and Russia’s historic sovereignty over the peninsula.
Kuzmin voiced a supposition in this connection that "these circumstances and arguments could be perceived quite appropriately in Romania, since he had quite frequently come across discussions in the Romanian media and in the blogosphere regarding the grounds on which Romania could unite with Bessarabia - a referendum of some kind or a definite historic right to that territory."
In response to persistent questions regarding the prospects for unification of Romania and Moldova, the two countries that have strong bonds in terms of history, ethnicity and language, Kuzmin recalled that Russia and Romania had recognized Moldova’s independence at a definite moment in the past and this recognition was registered in the November 19, 2001, Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Russia and Moldova.
"In any case, the people of Moldova has an exclusive right to decide on its own future in the form it will find appropriate," he said.
Kuzmin devoted his speech at the conference to the opportunities for developing mutually beneficial pragmatic cooperation between Russia and Romania amid the sanctions, the commentary said
He pointed out, for instance, a tendency towards an increase of the trade turnover that had taken a clear outline from January through to October 2017.
"At this moment, one can forecast with a big degree of certainty a growth of mutual trade upon the results of the year to around $ 4 billion compared with $ 3.2 billion last year," Kuzmin said.