MOSCOW, January 28. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has slammed Washington’s threat of possibly expelling Anatoly Antonov, the Russian Ambassador to the US, unless Moscow fulfills a number of Washington’s conditions on granting visas to the American envoy’s guards as plain rude.
"We have warned that if this obnoxiousness continues - and I can’t find any other way to refer to their statements saying "unless you receive the ambassador’s guards immediately, we will ask Antonov to leave the United States" - if this rudeness continues, we still have potential to truly level out our diplomatic presence," he said in an interview with radio stations on Friday.
Washington embarked on complicating the work of both countries’ diplomatic missions several years ago, when the Obama White House spearheaded the seizure of five diplomatic properties from Russia, Lavrov noted.
"This is another round of the crisis initiated by Obama who showed his true colors, three weeks before he left the White House, he decided to get back at Trump, slamming the door on the way out, and taking five diplomatic properties from us, while kicking out dozens of diplomats, who together with their families, were forced to pack their things in three days, well, that all started from this," the top diplomat explained.
Nevertheless, the sides are currently attempting to settle the situation now, Russia’s diplomatic chief said, adding that another meeting between the countries is planned in the next several weeks. "And, currently, we have channels, we spoke about it again with Blinken in Geneva, wrapping up our discussion on European security, that it is necessary to somehow normalize the situation, we offer resetting everything to zero starting from the awful and, let’s put it straightforwardly, petty move of the Nobel laureate Obama, to undo everything that started from it and what followed it," he concluded.