2023-04-29 13:00:00
Russia has denounced an “illegal act” by the Polish authorities and announces that it is responding to this “incursion into a diplomatic site”.
By VD with AFP
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LPoland announced on Saturday that it had seized the building of the Russian high school in Warsaw, an act immediately described as “illegal” by Russia, which promised a response. “This building will now belong to the town hall of Warsaw,” spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry, Lukasz Jasina, told AFP by telephone, stressing that it is a procedure of “referral by bailiff on behalf of the municipality. The police simply said they were just watching the proceedings and declined to comment.
Russia protested in stride. “It is an illegal act, an incursion into a diplomatic site,” said its ambassador to Warsaw, Sergei Andreyev, in a video broadcast by the Russian public news agency Ria Novosti. “Of course, a reaction will follow,” he stressed, adding that Russia would retaliate under the “principle of reciprocity”. “The school will continue its activities in other premises of the Russian diplomatic mission, we will ensure a good end to the school year for our children and the organization of exams,” said Sergei Andreyev.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has denounced “these hostile actions of the Polish authorities [qui] constitute a flagrant violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961”. An act “so bold by Warsaw, far beyond civilized interstate communication, will not remain without our severe reaction and the consequences for the Polish authorities”, he warned.
A previous
A year ago, Warsaw City Hall seized a former Russian diplomatic site, the subject of a legal dispute between Poland and Russia and nicknamed by Warsaw residents the “nest of spies”, to offer it to the Ukraine fighting Russian forces. At the time, these were ten-storey buildings built in the 1970s in the south of the capital which had been used in the past by Soviet diplomats, then by the Russian embassy.
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