Spokesperson of Russia’s Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova attends the annual press conference held by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, January 14, 2025. [Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters]
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has launched a new attack on Western countries, adopting rhetoric echoing Turkish and North Macedonian positions in relation to Greece.
In a post on Telegram on Tuesday, Zakharova responded to Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen, who had accused Moscow of violating “every one of the ten principles of the Helsinki Agreement.”
Calling the statement a “blatant lie,” Zakharova claimed that, on the contrary, member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had repeatedly breached those principles themselves.
Citing several examples, she referred to “the intervention of the black colonels’ junta in Greece in the intercommunal conflict in Cyprus [and] the attempted annexation of the island by Greece,” as well as “Greece’s blocking of international initiatives aimed at cooperation with the Republic of Macedonia (due to the name dispute).”
She also pointed to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the recognition of Kosovo’s independence in 2008, and Western support for what she described as the “staged coup of 2014” in Ukraine.
Zakharova concluded her post with personal attacks, describing Valtonen as “a technologist and financial executive, but not a diplomat,” and mocking European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, saying “everyone knows the real weight of the EU, which is controlled by a gynecologist.”