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According to the ministry, this is how Moscow reacts to Estonia’s decision last month to expel an employee from the Russian embassy.
As announced by the Estonian Foreign Ministry on July 15, such a move came in response to the expulsion of Consul Marto Latte from Russia at the Estonian Consulate General in Saint Petersburg.
On July 7, Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said that Latte had been declared undesirable.
This happened the day after the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested the Estonian diplomat, allegedly trying to obtain confidential information from a Russian citizen.
Tallinn called it a Russian provocation against an Estonian diplomat, and the accusations against him were unfounded.
According to a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday, Mr. Laidre made a strong protest and a note was issued saying that “on the basis of reciprocity, persona non grata An employee of the Estonian diplomatic mission in Moscow is announced and ordered to leave the territory of the Russian Federation within one week. “
The comment also states that the Russian side offers “to its Estonian partners to stop, not to further aggravate the situation”, otherwise Tallinn will receive “a new decisive response from the Russian Foreign Ministry.”
“At the same time, all responsibility for the deterioration of bilateral relations will lie entirely with Estonia,” he added.
Since the beginning of this year, tensions between Russia and the West have been intensified by a series of reciprocal expulsions of diplomats and accusations of espionage.
In April, Moscow ordered the Ukrainian consul in St. Petersburg to leave Russia when the FSB announced that it had caught him in an attempt to intercept classified information from a Russian citizen.
In the same month, Moscow also sent four Baltic diplomats in response to decisions by Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to send Russian diplomats in solidarity with the respective actions of some Central and Eastern European countries.
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