LONDON, May 22 (RIA Novosti), Maria Tabak – A high-ranking official from the British Foreign Ministry is to meet Thursday with the Russian deputy ambassador to discuss Prince Charles’ offensive comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin, a source in the British ministry told RIA Novosti Thursday.
“Just on the background: it is likely that a senior Foreign Office official will meet with the deputy ambassador of Russian Federation today,” the source said, without revealing further details of the meeting.
Later in the day, the Russian embassy in London confirmed to RIA Novosti that it had filed a request for official explanations regarding Prince Charles’ “outrageous remarks.”
“Minister-Counsellor Alexander Kramarenko will meet representatives of the British Foreign Ministry today in the late afternoon to discuss a range of bilateral cooperation issues. The outrageous remarks by Prince Charles in Canada, in respect of which we filed a request for official explanations from the Foreign Office, are on the agenda,” a representative of the embassy said.
Prince Charles, the eldest son of the present British queen, reportedly made the remarks during a tour of Canada when he told a former Polish war refugee that the takeover of Poland in 1939 was “not unlike… what Putin is doing.”
On Wednesday, Member of Parliament George Galloway told RIA Novosti that Prince Charles should write a personal letter of apology to President Putin after comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
“What Charles needs to do now is to write a personal apology to President Putin for what may have been intended to be a flippant remark but was crass, stupid and wildly, wildly inaccurate,” Galloway stressed.
A spokeswoman for Prince Charles told RIA Novosti earlier, “We don’t comment on private conversations.”
