Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania expel Russian diplomats in support of Czech Republic April 24, 2021
Lithuania s Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis.
TALLINN Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have all expelled Russian diplomats in a show of solidarity with the Czech Republic against Moscow.
Prague has accused Russian secret agents of involvement in a deadly explosion in the country in 2014.
Czech foreign and interior minister Jan Hamacek had called on European Union and NATO member states to also kick out Russian diplomats.
On Friday, Lithuania s Foreign Ministry confirmed it had summoned the country s ambassador to Moscow and declared two members of the embassy personae non-gratae .
Estonia announces expulsion of Russian diplomat as sign of solidarity with Czech Republic
The Russian ambassador had been summoned to Estoniaâs Foreign Ministry to lodge a strong protest in connection with the information about the alleged new details about the 2014 arms depot explosion
TALLINN, April 23. /TASS/. Estonia is expelling a Russian diplomat as a sign of solidarity with the Czech Republic, the Estonian Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
Read also As a sign of solidary [with the Czech Republic], Estonia will expel a Russian diplomat whose activities do not correspond to diplomatic activities agreed on in the Vienna Convention, the ministry said.
Follow RT on An iron curtain has descended across Europe. Or at least it will if Estonia’s former president is able to convince Brussels to completely close its borders to Russian students, workers and tourists amid growing political tensions.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who led the Baltic nation for a decade until 2016, proposed the policy on Saturday.
“Maybe there should be a ‘time out’ for any and I mean any visits from Russia,” he said.
“Just freeze visas except for family emergencies. It is Europe’s security at stake.”
Ilves, who was raised and educated in the US, served as the head of the Estonian desk for Washington’s state-run overseas media service Radio Free Europe during the final years of the Cold War. He was later appointed as Tallinn’s ambassador in Washington. Since stepping down from his country’s top job, he has taken a number of roles with prestigious think tanks and as a co-chair of the World Economic Forum.
By Reuters Staff
2 Min Read
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Tuesday it had detained a serviceman and his brother in the country’s west for having allegedly passed state secrets to Estonia.
A criminal case has been opened for high treason, the FSB said.
The serviceman was detained in front of an apartment building in Smolensk, a city 365km west of Moscow, by three masked officers in military fatigues and dragged into a black van, FSB footage carried by Russian news agency TASS showed.
The FSB did not provide details of any information it had passed on to Estonian authorities.
JERUSALEM Israel’s Health Ministry says it has detected the country’s first known cases of the new variant of the coronavirus. The ministry announced Wednesday that it found the variant in three people who are in government-run quarantine hotels after returning from the U.K. The source of a fourth case is still under investigation. Israel this week tightened its restrictions on entering the country, barring nearly all foreigners and requiring all returning Israelis to isolate in state-run hotels for 10 to 14 days. Flights from the U.K., Denmark and South Africa have been banned altogether.