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25 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, affirmed on Tuesday that there are currently 60 Russian prisoners in the United States and has assured that the “special channel” of communication opened between the parties on the prisoner exchange does not include journalists.
“A special channel has been created to discuss the problems of Russian citizens detained in the United States and American citizens detained in Russia,” he said at a press conference from New York, the TASS news agency reported.
In this sense, he stressed that in this channel of communication between the parties “no journalists are involved”, in reference to the case of the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, from the newspaper ‘The Wall Street Journal’, arrested in Russia for an alleged crime related to espionage.
The Russian minister has specified that there are about 60 Russian prisoners in US prisons. “In most cases, the charges are very dubious,” he said when asked about a possible prisoner swap for former US Marine Paul Whelan and journalist Evan Gershkovich.
Lavrov has claimed that the US side has refused to comply with the requirements of the bilateral consular convention. “If they have suspicions about Russian citizens, they should not be kidnapped like in Hollywood movies, but should go to Russia and express their suspicions,” he added, according to the aforementioned agency.
On the other hand, Lavrov has argued that the European Union “is militarizing in record time” and becomes an “aggressive structure” to “contain the Russian Federation.” Likewise, he has affirmed that the West has begun to speak “hysterically of a Third World War”.
