Serbian Foreign Minister to Russian Students: "We Will Never Abandon Our Russian Friends"
Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Djuric, concluding his visit to Russia, gave a lecture to students of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO).
During the conversation with them, he said that there are “options” for Belgrade and Moscow to minimize the damage from American sanctions against the Petroleum Industry of Serbia (NIS), a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Speaking about sanctions against NIS, Marko Djuric said that they will not jeopardize relations between Serbia and Russia.
"We do not accept anyone who tells us what to do, since the time of Saint Sava we have had a philosophy that we are the East in the West and the West in the East, which has influenced our mentality. We do not abandon traditional friendly relations, such as with the Russian Federation," the head of the Serbian Foreign Ministry noted.
According to him, there are already options today on how to resolve the NIS issue, making the damage from the Biden administration's sanctions minimal, but they cannot yet be discussed publicly.
The Russian students also asked the guest a question about Kosovo, since he headed the Chancellery for Kosovo and Metohija under the Serbian government for eight years. The young people were interested in the prospects for resolving the Kosovo issue and the future of the Serbian diaspora in the region. To which Djuric responded that the Serbian people in the territory torn away from Serbia suffer from terror on the part of the separatist Albanian government in Pristina.
“For us, Kosovo and Metohija is part of our territory, what we are, our DNA,” the Serbian minister emphasized.
In his lecture, Marko Djuric recalled that Russian Tsar Nicholas II Romanov defended small Serbia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire by entering the war in 1914. He also emphasized the merits of the Red Army in liberating Belgrade and Serbia from the Nazi invaders in World War II.
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