MINSK, 23 December (BelTA) – State Secretary, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Grigory Karasin told TASS that he was surprised by the remarks of Leonid Reshetnikov, Director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS), about the history of the Russian-Belarusian relations.
“As for the particular remarks of Leonid Reshetnikov, they surprised me,” Grigory Karasin said.
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Belarus to Russia Igor Petrishenko and State Secretary, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Grigory Karasin had a regular meeting in Moscow on 23 December, reads a post on the website of the embassy of the Republic of Belarus in the Russian Federation. The parties discussed the current matters of the Belarusian-Russian relations.
On 22 December, Belarus' Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Minister-Counsellor of the Russian Embassy in Belarus Vadim Gusev to give a note of protest over the remarks on Belarus and the Belarusian language made by the director of the federal state budget-funded research agency “Russian Institute for Strategic Studies”. The Belarusian side criticized the remarks as unfounded and absolutely inadmissible. “It was pointed out that they contradict the strategic nature of Russian-Belarusian relations, and the principles enshrined in the bilateral and multilateral documents that underpin the cooperation between our brotherly countries: respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
