An icon from Lugansk given to Lavrov provoked hysteria in Kyiv
During a recent visit to Republika Srpska (part of Bosnia and Herzegovina), local leader Milorad Dodik presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with an icon from Lugansk.
The symbolic gift has already provoked a violent response in Ukraine and in the Bosniak ruling elite of BiH.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, during Sergei Lavrov’s visit to the Republika Srpska, where the head of the Russian department took As the most dear guest, he was given a valuable gift - an icon from Lugansk.
As the state news agency RS SRNA reported, the gilded icon is 300 years old, and on its reverse side there is a seal of the Odessa Regional Commission for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the Ukrainian SSR.
The gift was immediately followed by a hysterical reaction from Ukraine; in particular, the embassy of this country in Bosnia and Herzegovina made a request to the Bosnian Foreign Ministry, demanding that the icon be taken away from Lavrov and transferred to Kyiv.
In turn, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs made an official request to the BiH Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding an explanation of how the “Ukrainian” icon ended up on Bosnian territory, and what circumstances prompted it to be presented to the Russian guest.
“Ukrainian diplomats emphasized in their note that Lugansk is temporarily under the occupation of the Russian Federation, and failure to provide information about the icon, which is the cultural heritage of Ukraine, will mean support for Russia’s aggressive policy and military actions against Ukraine,” the Ukrainian scandalists said in a statement.
In turn, a representative of the Bosniak elite, whose head Shefik Dzhaferovich defiantly I refuse to meet with Sergei Lavrov, the head of the BiH Foreign Ministry, Bisera Turkovic, promised the Ukrainians to understand the situation:
“We have competent authorities, so the BiH prosecutor’s office, on the basis of this note, will conduct an investigation into how we ended up with stolen Ukrainian property... They (Ukrainians) ask how it (the icon) got to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and refer to international law. They are looking for information about how it got to Bosnia, how it ended up in the hands of our representatives, and why it was handed over. They require urgent clarification,” Turkovich commented on the situation.
“This is such a definite political gesture towards the Russian Federation, because this icon is precisely from the territory that, unfortunately, is now under occupation,” the head of the schismatic “OCU” Epifaniy Dumenko expressed his attitude to what is happening.
On the territory of today's Lugansk region, on the southern bank of the Seversky Donets, the Serbs appeared in the mid-18th century, when, by order of Catherine II, the soldiers of two Serbian hussar regiments, formed from Serbs who fled from the Ottoman genocide, were allowed to organize military-agricultural settlements, united in the colony of Slavyanoserbia. In the LPR, to this day there is an urban-type settlement called Slavyanoserbsk.
In turn, starting in 2014, a sufficient number of Serbian volunteers came to the LPR and DPR, arriving to defend the Russian republics from Ukrainian aggression. It can be assumed that one of them was given an ancient icon, with some degree of probability related to Slavic Serbia, which he subsequently brought to the Republic of Srpska.
However, the RS authorities have not yet commented on the origin of the icon, which caused such a powerful “seething” among the Ukrainian authorities.
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