PRAGUE, June 6. /TASS/. Relations between Prague and Moscow are at a difficult phase and can hardly be normalized soon, Czech Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhanek said on Sunday.
"The Czech Republic is now at a very difficult phase of relations with Russia," he said in an interview with CNN Prima News. "It is an illusion to hope that we will be able to normalize these relations soon."
Nevertheless, in his words, it is necessary to look at prospects for relations between the Czech Republic and Russia. "Next week, I will ask the leaders of all the [parliamentary] political parties to appoint their experts on issues of foreign policy. I will also organize roundtable meetings on the Czech-Russian relations at the foreign ministry," he said.
Party experts will discuss how to build relations with Russia in the future. According to the minister, the country’s leading political forces need to agree a common position on this problem ahead of the parliamentary elections, due on October 8 and 9.
Kulhanek rejected a possibility of further reduction of the personnel of the Russian embassy following the incident in Vrbetice. "We should not lower this matter to the level of diplomat expulsion race," he said, adding that all the country’s senior officials were unanimous on the anti-Russian measures taken after incident was made public.
He also recalled that Prague had recently called on Moscow to delete it from the list of unfriendly countries. Such a measure, in his words, seriously complicates chances for settling the Russian-Czech relations.
Relations between Russia and the Czech Republic soured after April 17 when the Czech authorities claimed that Russia was allegedly behind the blasts at munitions depots in the village of Vrbetice in the east of the Czech Republic in 2014 and expelled 18 Russian diplomats who, it claimed, were officers of Russian intelligence services. The Russian foreign ministry expressed resolute protests following Prague’s step made "under ungrounded and far-fetched pretexts" and declared 20 employees of the Czech embassy in Moscow personae non gratae.
Later, the sides agreed to align the embassies’ personnel on a parity basis. From June 1, each of them will be allowed to have seven diplomats, 25 technical personnel and 19 locally-hired employees.