CHISINAU, November 28. /TASS/. Moldova’s Socialist Party that supports President Igor Dodon has initiated a parliamentary inquiry into the expulsion from the country of two Russian journalists, the Zvezda TV channel news analyst Alexei Samolyotov and the producer of the All-Russia State Broadcasting Company, Marina Safronova.
"The radical actions of the ruling majority that encroach on the provisions of international documents on the mass media and human rights are as puzzling as alarming," the party said in a statement circulated on Tuesday.
"The Socialists plan to initiative a parliamentary inquiry into all the cases of illegal deportations or Russian citizens over the past several months," it said.
President Dodon, too, has demanded written explanations from the government over the incident that affected Samolyotov and Safronova.
"By making ever more new anti-Russian demarches, the ruling pro-European coalition seeks to damage Moldovan-Russian cooperation by hook or by crook and to distract people’s attention from flops in the economy and the falling living standards," he told TASS.
"Those standing behind the actions seek to please the Western politicians wielding the anti-Russian policies and, on top of that, to provoke retaliatory measures that would complicate relations between our countries," Dodon said, adding that he had demanded written explanations on what had happened to the Russian journalists.
Earlier reports said Samolyotov and Safronova were detained at Chisinau airport because they had allegedly failed to specify the purposes of their trip to Moldova.
This is far from the first case where the Moldovan authorities deny entry of the country to Russian cultural personalities. In July, a ban of this kind affected a group of performers who were going to Transdniestria, or the self-proclaimed Dniester Republic, to take part in a concert on the occasion of the republic’s 25th anniversary.
At the same time, the authorities denied entry to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.