BUCHAREST, March 27. /TASS/. Russian Embassy in Romania has described the decision of a number of European countries to expel Russian diplomats as an act of collective political madness. It placed a laconic commentary at its official homepage.
"The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bucharest finds it quite probable that that the decision makes manifest collective political madness, all the more so since any other plausible explanations are non-existent," it said.
The Romanian Foreign Ministry made public its decision on Monday to expel a Russian diplomat in the wake of the alleged poisoning of the former Russian intelligence officer and Britih spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury. It quoted a decision of the EU Council, which agreed with an assessment by the UK, in line with which the Russian Federation is responsible for the attack with a high degree of probability."
On March 4, former Russian intelligence officer and convicted British spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia were allegedly poisoned with a nerve agent, according to British investigators. Later, London stated that this agent was designed in Russia and blamed Moscow for being behind the incident based on this assumption. The Russian side refuted all accusations, saying that neither the Soviet Union, nor Russia had any programs for developing this agent. London expelled 23 Russian diplomats without providing any evidence and stated that other anti-Russian measures would follow, after which Moscow took retaliatory measures by ejecting the same number of the British embassy staff members and ordering the closure of the UK’s consulate general in St. Petersburg and terminating the activity of the British Council in Russia.
France, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the US, Canada, Italy, and some other countries said on Thursday they were expelling a total of about a hundred Russian diplomats in the wake of the incident involving the former Russian intelligence officer and British spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury.
The Western nations opted for siding with Britain’s allegations spearheaded at Russia in spite of the fact the British government had not provided a single conclusive evidence on the case.
The Russian Foreign Ministry offered a quick reaction to the situation saying Moscow would not leave the West’s ‘solidarity motion’ unreciprocated.
Russian officials and experts have said on many occasions in the past neither the former USSR nor Russia had developed or produced the nerve agent codenamed Novichok, which was allegedly used in Salisbury to poison Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33.