Russian Ambassador Valery Kuzmin: Modest developments in the bilateral political and diplomatic areas

Russian diplomacy has continued “consistently the activity of restoring pragmatic reciprocal advantageous relations with Romania” in various fields, but in the political and diplomatic areas modest results have been made, Russian ambassador to Bucharest, Valery Kuzmin, said on Friday during a press conference.

“We are pleased to note that the bilateral trade turnover in 2017 has increased by more than 20% and, according to very realistic estimates, it will reach USD 4 billion at the end of the 12 months,” the diplomat said, according to hotnews.ro.

With regard to Romania-Russia diplomatic relations, Kuzmin reminded that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin’s aircraft was denied in July 2017 to overfly Romania. In this context, the Russian Ambassador said that “certain circles in Bucharest behave like the Catholic who wanted to be a better Catholic than the Pope in Rome – trying to complicate the establishment of dialogue channels, in spite of the well-known decision made by the NATO summit in Warsaw on the need for this dialogue.”

He pointed out that the sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union do not apply to transit and revealed that Rogozin’s aircraft had overflew Hungary and Poland.

“It’s relevant to say that on December 23, 2016, the Romanian Ministry for Foreign Affairs had posted a comment reading that the so-called EU sanctions do not apply in case of transit overfly, and the ban to carry out such a regular flight would constitute a violation of international law and of the Chicago Civil Aviation Convention of 1947,” the Ambassador said in a press conference.

“Unfortunately, the mentioned ‘incident’ was not the only one. Nevertheless, we expect that in the near future this unpleasant page of our relationships will eventually be turned. These hopes are reinforced by the energy and creativity with which the Romanian diplomacy has started preparations for the rotating European Council presidency (in early 2019) and the promotion of its candidacy for a non-permanent seat with the UN Security Council (for 2020/2021),” Kuzmin said, according to the official transcription of the Russian Embassy