The problem of Romania’s treasure is “a dead and mothball-ridden cat”, Russian ambassador Valeri Kuzmin declared in Bucharest on Thursday.
In 1916, in the midst of World War I, Romania sent its national treasure to Russia for safekeeping in a mutual agreement of return. The hoard consists of almost 94 tonnes of gold coins, jewels and art objects – currently evaluated at around 5 billion USD. It has never been returned.
Under pressure from the Central Powers, which had occupied most of Romania, on December 2, 1916, the National Bank decided to relocate Romania’s treasury to Moscow, to ensure its preservation, explains Balkan Insight.
The diplomat also said that the former Romanian partners “continue to pull out, as we say in Russia, “a dead and mothball-ridden cat”, referring to the problem of the treasure that Russia should return to Romania. Repeating an idea circulated previously by Moscow, Kuzmin clearly said that Romania’s treasure will not be returned and claimed that, on the contrary, Romania remained indebted to Russia, reports financialintelligence.ro.
Bogdan Aurescu said in February 2022: “We are still interested in progress in the Joint Commission dealing with Romania’s treasury, which was deposited in Moscow during World War I. We have not abandoned this issue”.
Kuzmin evoked a scene between former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Nicolae Ceausescu, in the 1960s. “Comrades, Brezhnev told Ceausescu, I must tell you, as from communist to communist, to forget about the treasure. Because, as is written in the legal documents, as a result of all the activities that fall under Romania’s responsibility, Romania has a greater debt to Russia than Russia has to Romania. But we don’t need this debt from you. We forgive you of this debt”, declared Ambassador Kuzmin, according to News.ro.
Speaking about the deterioration of bilateral relationship between Romania and Russia, Ambassador Valeri Kuzmin noted that the political and diplomatic dialogue is practically frozen and recalled with disapproval the mutual reduction of diplomatic personnel and the closing of Russian cultural centres in the past year.
Valeri Kuzmin was disturbed by the attitude of former foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu, currently a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, whom he said blamed Russia “foaming at the mouth” for what happened in Bucha.
“After the special operation in Ukraine began, Romania was among the first countries to define this operation as aggression and began to blame Russia, foaming at the mouth. We can also remember the Bucha incident, I don’t want to say who exactly, but they blamed Russia, directly, without any investigation”, Valeri Kuzmin said.
The Moscow diplomat was disturbed that Romania addressed international justice in relation to the war crimes in Bucha. “There was never any evidence either then or now, they failed to give us at least a list of people who, according to their words, were killed by the Russian military”, said the ambassador.
An excellent diplomat of Romania, who now occupies a seat at the International Court of Justice, then, foaming at the mouth, blamed Russia for what happened in Bucea without any evidence and promised Russia that he will bring her before the court and so on”, Kuzmin said of Aurescu.
He claims, instead, that everything that happened in Bucha “was organized by PR agencies from Ukraine and Great Britain”.
Ukraine, Romania, and the general West accuse Russia of war crimes in Bucha, an accusation that the Kremlin denies. The allegations relate to the mass killing of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war by Russian armed forces during the fighting and occupation of the city of Bucha, in the first part of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photographic and video evidence of the massacre emerged on April 1, 2022, after Russian forces withdrew from the city. According to local authorities, 458 bodies were recovered from the city, including nine children under the age of 18.
At the same time, the ambassador recalled that Romania declared that it would train Ukrainian pilots for the F-16 fighter jets, which, the diplomat emphasized, are capable of carrying missiles with a long range of 500 km and nuclear missiles.
He said that during the past year, Russia told Romanian authorities several times that the persistent military assistance given to “the criminal neo-Nazi regime in Kiev is inadmissible. Our efforts were aimed at warning the Romanian authorities about the possible use of American fighter jets from Romanian territory in future military operations – those planes would be given to Kiev soon, there were even recent news that some of them had already been deployed in Ukraine – against the population or the Russian armed forces, this will be considered by Russia as direct involvement in the Ukrainian conflict”, Valeri Kuzmin pointed out.
The Russian ambassador in Bucharest said that he was not presented with conclusive evidence after fragments of drones fell in the Danube Delta. He claimed that this also happened when Romania “insisted” that a Russian ship entered its territorial waters.
Despite all these topics of friction between Moscow and Bucharest, Valeri Kuzmin claims that “no one can accuse Russia of sabotaging the bilateral relationship with Romania”.
“Since I arrived here in 2016, I have tried many times and failed to organize a meeting of the Romanian-Russian intergovernmental commission that deals with economic, technical and scientific issues. I didn’t succeed”, complained the diplomat.
In the end, the ambassador let it be understood that the ball is in Romania’s court: “We remain neighboring countries and we have every possibility to restore our bilateral relations. Everything depends on the decision of responsible people”, said the ambassador at the end of the press briefing, not before wishing the journalists success in their work, on which occasion he recalled that Tucker Carlson was in Moscow to interview Putin, and now he is criticized by “totalitarian democracy” in the West.
