The spokeswoman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, called "dangerous stupidity" the decision of the Bulgarian authorities to deny Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's plane from flying through the country's airspace if she was on board.
"It is not just stupidity, but the dangerous stupidity of some intriguer in the power structures of Bulgaria. The fact is that the rules of air traffic are regulated by the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation from 1944. It prescribes the territory of a country must understood as “land territories and those adjacent to them include territorial waters.” Airspace is not included in the term “territory.” In this sense, already illegal EU sanctions cannot be extended to an overflying aircraft carrying a person , which is prohibited from entering the territory of the state," Zakharova wrote on the Telegram channel. According to her, for the first time in history, the state authorities prohibited not a plane, but a person in the plane from being in the sky, because according to a note from the Bulgarian diplomatic department the Russian MFA plane was allowed to fly over it.
"Did the Bulgarian officials think that such measures could be applied in response to the thousands of NATO functionaries who are on our mirror stop lists? Did they think in principle about setting a dangerous world precedent? I think not. Who gave the right to illiterate officials in Sofia to disgrace the Bulgarian people? ...We, by the way, are already in Skopje", Zakharova added.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov arrived in the capital of North Macedonia, Skopje, to participate in the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The plane was flying through Greece, and before that the route was expected to pass through Bulgaria. According to TASS, the Bulgarian side refused to let the plane of the Russian foreign minister go if Zakharova was on board.
The note from the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, available to the BGNES News Agency, states in particular: "Permission to participate in the above-mentioned meeting in Skopje is granted to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov and his accompanying delegation in accordance with the note ... The permission does not refer to the director of the information and press department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, who is on the list of sanctions, in accordance with the current EU legislation."
The length of Lavrov plane's route was about 4,000 km and the journey lasted more than five hours. Lavrov's plane flew over Turkey and Greece on its way to North Macedonia. /BGNES
