Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed recent allegations that Russian authorities were involved in last year’s coup attempt in Montenegro as unsubstantiated.
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This comes after British newspaper the Telegraph published a report on Sunday which claimed Moscow had conspired to overthrow Montenegro’s government. Senior UK government sources claimed that Russia plotted to assassinate Montenegro’s prime minister and overthrow its government last autumn, allegedly “to sabotage the country’s plan to join NATO.”
Last November, Montenegrin authorities announced they had foiled a coup attempt and arrested some 50 people from Montenegro, Serbia and Russia during the country’s parliamentary elections.
“The [Telegraph article] you mentioned stands in the same line as yet another unfounded accusations against us and our country, including hacking attacks against the entire West, interventions in the election campaigns of the majority of Western countries, the Trump administration’s ties with Russian special services and many others. [Yet] none of these unsubstantiated allegations have been supported by any facts,” Lavrov told reporters on Monday, commenting on the Telegraph report.
The Russian Embassy in London earlier also rejected the report as “pure innuendo.”
The entire report is a recycling of long discarded news in order to “to stoke tensions with Russia,” the Russian embassy said on Sunday. Previously, Moscow had already “categorically denied the possibility of official involvement in any attempts to commit any unlawful activities” during parliamentary elections in Montenegro in October 2016.
