MOSCOW, July 6. /TASS/. It was a real challenge for Russian diplomats to work amid the coronavirus pandemic, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Monday in an interview with TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman.
"This period was a global challenge for diplomats, first of all in terms of commitment to moral and ethical principles, i.e. whether we are ready to be responsible for each word we utter, whether our words and actions jibe," she said. "We repeated the phrase ‘Russia never turns its back on its citizens’ so many times and at some point life place all of us in a situation when we had to stand by these words and show if we were really ready to implement the concepts we have been offering, if we were really responsible about what we say. It was a real challenge."
No one could ever anticipate that countries across the globe would close their borders that "people’s lives would be divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ and their plans would simply cease to be plans," she noted.
But even despite certain problems, the program for repatriating Russian nationals stuck in foreign countries was implemented quite successfully, Zakharova noted.
"Lots of people - diplomats, senior officials and employees of Russian ministries - had been focused on that for over three months," she said. "By today, this program has actually become a program of vital support to our nationals who are staying abroad or have close ties with those staying abroad.".