Ambassador Yakovenko: Russians Living in UK Decided to Vote for Putin in Defiance of UK Measures

- Now, let's go live to London. One of the most respected and famous ambassadors in the world, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia to the UK, Aleksandr Vladimirovich Yakovenko.

Thank you for agreeing to tell us everything, to give your comments. We truly hope you can explain to us what's happening in London right now. Today, probably for the first time, our Ministry of Defense got involved with the comments. Yesterday, we witnessed our diplomats' departure. Today, or actually last night, they finally arrived home to us. Do we understand correctly that this is 40% of our diplomatic mission? How do you work now, under these circumstances?

 

Aleksandr Yakovenko, the Russian Ambassador to the UK: "Thank you for inviting me to your studio. Before I answer the question about the 40%, I must tell you how the election of the Russian President went on in London. The thing is that 6 years ago, according to our estimates, 22% of votes were cast for Putin, of those people that took part in voting. This year, it was already 52%. These were the same people, the same city, the same electoral district, almost the same amount of people, and the result is absolutely incredible. I must say, this proves that the entire anti-Russian campaign here, including statements by the officials, has failed miserably. This is a new reality, the UK will now have to live alongside with our fellow Russians.

Now back to our issue of the 40%. Of course, it will seriously weaken the work of the Embassy, because it's almost half of the Embassy, which means we'll have half the people in each district. The Consular Division has suffered the most. There, we give approximately 89,000 visas to British citizens per year. Can you imagine the workload? Only a few people worked there. This means the processing times will be increased. Before a regular visa took 5-6 days to process, now we'll have to double that time, or maybe even increase it to 20 days. If at some point, we'll fill in those spots, we just don't know what the UK's policy will be yet, since up until now they've been postponing giving out visas to Russian diplomats. This anti-Russian campaign has been going on for years. On average, a diplomat had to wait for 1.5 years for a visa to go work in the UK. This means that from the moment they apply for a visa, they have to wait for 1.5 years. Of course, it's unpleasant, but they had a goal to create difficulties for us, so this problem hasn't just surfaced today. This has been going on for years, especially since the whole Syria business started, and after the coup in Ukraine, where our position differed from the UK's".