Czech Republic threatened to expel 60 more employees of the Russian embassy

"The speech would concern about 60 people. Our goal is for this to correspond to the state that exists at the moment in our embassy in Moscow", - said the head of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an interview with Lidove noviny.

He did not specify how the Russian diplomatic mission would react to this.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova commented on Prague's statement.

"There is no task to normalize the work or make it normal, adequate from the Czech side. There is a task to arrange such a performance, which they are doing”, - she said on the air of the radio station “Govorit Moskva”.

According to Zakharova, Russia and the Czech Republic have different systems for forming the personnel of the embassies.

"Many states - not only Western ones - hire people from among the local population. Thus, they form their embassy. We do not have this practice. Only diplomats are sent as diplomatic staff. Administrative and technical personnel are also sent from our country", - explained Zakharova.

Note that today it became known that the Czech Senate demanded the termination of the agreement on friendly relations and cooperation with Russia, as well as the reduction of the number of the Russian Embassy in Prague to one person.

On April 21, the new head of the Czech Foreign Ministry, Jakub Kulganek, summoned Russian Ambassador Alexander Zmeevsky and said that the Czech Republic would equalize the number of employees of the Russian embassy with the number of Czech diplomats in Moscow, if by 12:00 on April 22 Russia did not return all previously expelled employees of the Czech embassy. For his part, the press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, noted that Vladimir Putin, in his Address on April 21, declared "the futility of talking with us in the style of demands".