TUNISIA, December 21. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the German authorities as "kleptomaniacs" while commenting on the German Prosecutor General's Office’s call to seize Russian assets.

"They are kleptos. We realized this a long time ago. They have been duplicitous all along in political terms, you know: in the sense of defaulting on agreements and trying to deceive someone. Now they have turned out to be kleptocratic in the literal sense of this word," Lavrov told a news conference following his visit to Tunisia.

He noted that the US in its clandestine contacts was explaining to Europeans "how best to change laws" to grab and steal Russian assets.

"They [the West] are now laser-focused on the idea of finding some legal way to confiscate Russia’s assets, or, as I understand it, as a first step, to use the profit they make from these assets to send to Ukraine. The Europeans still have some rudimentary respect for their own laws, so they are delaying these decisions. But according to our sources, the Americans in closed contacts are explaining to them how to change these laws to take and finally steal everything," he said. We'll see. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov today, I think, commented on a similar issue. He said that in case such confiscation physically takes place, we also have something to confiscate in response."

Earlier, the German Prosecutor General's Office said it had sent a request to the court to seize Russian assets worth more than 720 million euros, thus replenishing the state budget. A spokeswoman for the Frankfurt-on-the-Main court has told TASS that the motion was still under preliminary consideration, and there was no decision yet whether to start considering it on its merits.