MOSCOW, March 23. /TASS/. The number of Russian diplomats Poland wants to expel is larger than the actual list of the embassy’s staffers, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on the Rossiya-24 round-the-clock television news channel on Wednesday.
"In fact, they have mentioned an unprecedented number of people. We do not have any names for the time being, but honestly speaking, we are curious where such a figure has come from. Actually, it is somewhat larger than the actual number of diplomatic staffers," Zakharova said. "We would like to have clarity as to who is in question. Then it will be possible to make some conclusions."
Zakharova stressed that Moscow would respond to the expulsions of its diplomats "in a proper way."
Earlier on Wednesday, Russia’s ambassador to Poland Sergey Andreyev was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to be handed a note demanding the expulsion of 45 Russian diplomats whom Warsaw holds responsible for intelligence activity. Andreyev described this decision as groundless and said that Russia would take proportionate retaliatory measures to expel Polish diplomats.
The ambassador himself is absent from the list of diplomats to be expelled. Andreyev said that diplomatic relations between the two countries remained and the Russian embassy in Poland kept working. The diplomats on the Polish authorities’ list are to leave for home within different deadlines, five days at the latest. No possibility of replacing the leaving diplomats is envisaged.