Foreign Minister of Netherlands, lied about the meeting with Putin, resigned
MOSCOW, February 13 — RIA Novosti. The Minister of foreign Affairs of the Netherlands Halbe Zijlstra confessed to lying about the meeting with Vladimir Putin, resigned, reports the Telegraaf.
It’s a decision he made on the eve of talks with Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the foreign Ministry reported that waiting for the arrival of the Dutch Minister and no changes from the Russian side.
What lied to the Minister of foreign Affairs
In an interview with Volkskrant Zijlstra admitted that his story about how he attended the meeting with the Russian President at his dacha in 2006, were untrue. According to him, he went for deception to protect the real participant of this meeting, who shared with him information about what Putin allegedly called Belarus, Ukraine, Baltic States and Kazakhstan parts of the “great Russia”. Starting in 2014, Zijlstra repeatedly told that heard these words personally.
The Prime Minister of the Netherlands mark Rutte said that the Minister acted ‘unreasonably’, but will remain in his post because the content of history is not disputed. Opposition parties criticized the Kingdom Zeilstra and demanded to discuss the incident in Parliament, prompting the Prime Minister to participate in the debate.
Who really was at Putin’s dacha
Later the former CEO of Shell Jeroen van der Veer wrote to the Volkskrant newspaper a letter in which he said that he told Zeilstra story of meeting with Putin.
According to van der veer, he was in the country of the Russian President, and then handed the foreign Minister a statement of Putin about the “great Russia”. But as noted by van der Veer, he didn’t say anything that would interpret his words in the “aggressive way”.