As Morski writes, five months after, as he put it, he “discovered the warm and poetic soul of Sergei” and read poetry by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Russian, Croatian Foreign and European Affairs Minister Gordan Grlic Radman has written a decision to expel Russian diplomats from the Republic of Croatia.
This comes as a very important sign of solidarity and a response to the latest developments and brutal Russian aggression in Ukraine where we’re being stunned by the crimes and horrors committed by the Russian army in that innocent country.
”In addition to expelling Russian diplomats, we are also actively working on freezing the property of those persons under sanctions,” Minister Gordan Grlic Radman revealed for RTL. State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs Frano Matosic also added:
”There are 893 persons and 65 legal entities on our sanctions list. We expect this situation to change soon again, given that a new package of measures will be adopted in Brussels. Russian diplomats in Croatia, among other things, are being left without the luxury they enjoyed, primarily on the coast, as well as the freezing of the money in their accounts. Their companies are being frozen, in terms of preventing those persons on the sanctions list from using these economic resources to extract funds that could be passed on for aggression against Ukraine,” said Matosic.
Otherwise, that number is much higher, because not all of the seized yachts whose connection with Russia is being established are counted. The real owners are known for three of them. Croatia doesn’t decide on the sanctions independently, those decisions are made in Brussels. The rich often try to hide everything they have, so they register their property on distant islands and in third names, making it challenging to determine what is actually Russian-owned and what isn’t.
When it comes to the question of whether or not SOA (Croatian Security and Intelligence Agency) helps in determining what is Russian property in Croatia, the answer is that of course it does.
The Russian Embassy in Zagreb is also closely following everything that is happening, and when asked about the expulsion of Russian diplomats from this country, they say that they don’t want to comment on it until they receive official information from the Croatian Government.
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