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Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladzimir Makay said the incident in Riga was an “act of state vandalism,” the BelTA news agency reported.
The Minister also announced that the Latvian Ambassador, Einar Semanis, had been summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and offered to leave Belarus 24 hours a day.
“The envoy was offered to leave Belarus within 24 hours. All diplomatic and administrative technical staff of the embassy were also offered to leave Belarus within 48 hours. [Pasiūlyta] leave only an administrative technician here to maintain the building, ”said V. Makėjus.
The Latvian Foreign Ministry confirmed that E. Semanis and other embassy employees had been ordered to leave Belarus.
In response to the Belarusian decision, the Latvian ministry summoned the Belarusian trustee and reported that Belarusian diplomats would be expelled from the country and could return only when relations between the two countries were normalized.
Mr. Makey said that Belarus was ready for a symmetrical response from Latvia.
Earlier on Monday, at the World Hockey Championships in Riga, the historic Belarusian flag in white and red was raised between the flags of the participating states.
Latvian Foreign Minister Edgar Rinkevičius and Riga Mayor Martinis Stakis replaced the official Belarusian flag with the historic Belarusian flag at the Radisson Blu Hotel Latvija, where the Belarusian hockey team resides during the championship.
Stakis said the gesture was an initiative by the Riga City Council to express its support for people suffering from the regime of authoritarian Belarusian leader Aliaksandr Lukashenko. According to him, the initiative was supported by the Belarusian opposition.
“The flags symbolizing the state terrorist regime are out of place in Riga, so we took them off,” wrote the mayor of the capital on Twitter.
E. Rinkevičius added that the change from the official Belarusian flag to the historical one also shows Latvia’s attitude to the “act of terrorism” by the Belarusian authorities: the forced landing of a passenger plane flying from Athens to Vilnius in Minsk to arrest an opposition journalist.
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