UNITED NATIONS, April 25. /TASS/. Moscow hopes that the United Nations will do everything in its power to settle the problem about US entry visas, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday, commenting on the situation with the non-issuance of US visas for Russian journalists in Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s delegation.
"We hope that the United Nations Secretariat and the leadership of the UN’s relevant structures will use the legally binding agreements with the host nation and make every effort to correct this unacceptable situation," she said at a meeting of the UN Committee on Information.
According to Zakharova, Russia has no choice but to raise this matter at the United Nations. "We have to raise the issue that the American side continues abusing its status as the host country of the United Nations headquarters. Washington played up the spectacle of issuing visas to a team of journalists who were on their way to New York to cover the events of the Russian presidency at the UN Security Council attended by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov," she noted.
She pointed to the large-scale visa shenanigans that US officials were engaging in. "American representatives <…> are already engaged in visa fraud on an industrial scale. Visas are either not issued or issued after the check-in for the last flight is over. Why the last flight? Because direct flights between Moscow, Washington and New York, which used to be made by Russian air carriers at a high level, have been blocked by the US administration," she said.
She also noted that Washington is delaying extending visas to Russian journalists working in the United States. "US consulates in Russia don’t extend visas to correspondents. Journalists have to apply to American consular establishments in third countries. Delays in the visa extension procedure are also often practiced," she stressed.
She slammed such practices are the effective genocide of Russian journalists in the United States. "It is a virtual genocide of Russian journalists and journalists in general in the United States," she stated, adding that the West is continuing to get rid of any media presence it doesn’t like and is aggressively imposing its agenda on the rest of the world.
"The process of wiping out unwanted media presence continues to this day. And the West has not confined itself to the above-mentioned repression. Such a destructive agenda, based on illegitimate unilateral restrictions, is being aggressively imposed on other members of the international community," she stressed.
According to Zakharova, the situation around freedom of speech and equal access to information keeps getting worse and worse. "Using their dominant media position and potential, a number of states, who have proclaimed themselves as advanced democracies, have totally cleansed their national information space from alternative points of view in violation of all their international commitments in this sphere," she added.