Russian authorities on Monday downplayed the significance of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s medical consultation in Bali, Indonesia, the country to which he has gone to head Russia’s delegation to the G20 summit.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has called reports of Lavrov’s alleged hospitalization «false.» «We can’t believe it. It turns out that he has been hospitalized. This, of course, a stunt of falsehood,» she asserted, according to information from the Interfax news agency.
Zakharova has also included on her Telegram account a video showing Lavrov in shorts and a T-shirt reading a series of documents.
Lavrov himself, for his part, has stressed that he is at the hotel «reading material and preparing ahead of Tuesday’s summit» and recalled that the West has been «reporting for a decade that the president (Vladimir Putin) is ill.» «This is the kind of game they play in politics,» asserted the 72-year-old minister, who urged the media to «tell the truth more often.»
For his part, the governor of Bali, I Wayan Koster, has indicated that Lavrov went to the hospital of Sanglá a day after arriving in Bali for a «revision», although shortly after he left the medical center with «good health condition», as the Indonesian newspaper ‘The Jakarta Post’ has gathered.
