Photo:
© RIA Novosti . Vitaliy Belousov
The Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the day before had a brief conversation with the Minister of foreign Affairs of Canada Christ Freeland, which is in the second “black list” of Russia.
Freeland was denied entry to Russia even before this year she became Minister. Earlier, a source in the Russian foreign Ministry explained that it does not prevent her to meet with Russian officials on the “fields” of any international forum.
“We communicated yesterday for an informal dinner. We touched on the topic of Russian-canadian relations. We had a brief conversation before the start of this event”, — said the Russian Minister.
“Over dinner it came out about the Ukraine, how the Ukrainian crisis has a negative impact on relations between Russia and Western countries. There was a little debate, I drew attention to the manifestations of neo-Nazism, chauvinism, which we now see in Ukraine, when in fact neither the President nor the Prime Minister, and the radicals define the way of life in this nearby, close to us the country,” — said Lavrov.
An example of this, according to him, is the bill on the state language, according to which, if adopted, “all citizens of Ukraine, regardless of what language they prefer to speak, whether Russian, Hungarian, Romanian or Polish, will have to solve all their daily problems to use the Ukrainian language.”
“The fact that this discriminatory measure, that it is contrary to the European Convention on languages is obvious, but our canadian colleague was not aware of the fact that such a bill exists. I promised him to send” — said the Minister.
Itself Freeland, whose mother is a Ukrainian by origin, fluent in Russian, and in the course of his speech at the Arctic Council it is even addressed in Russian to representatives of Russia.
The Russian foreign Minister takes part in meeting of the Arctic Council. Before the trip to Alaska he visited Washington, where he met with U.S. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson and President Donald trump.