OREANDA-NEWS   The Czech Foreign Ministry has sued Russia with a demand to pay for the free use of land for diplomatic services that have already left. This is reported by the Czech CHTK agency.

Czech authorities are demanding to pay 53 million kronor ($2.4 million) rent for the land on which the domestic premises of the Russian embassy in Prague are located. The land under the consulates General in Karlovy Vary and Brno, which were already closed in May 2022, is also mentioned.

The total area of the plots is 49.2 thousand square meters.

The head of the Czech Foreign Ministry, Jan Lipavsky, said that he had not received answers from Moscow to pre-trial appeals. According to him, Russia has received "unjustified enrichment" in three years.

On May 17, 2023, the Czech government canceled nine resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers of Czechoslovakia, according to which 59 land plots were transferred to the USSR for free use. They are used by Russia as the successor country of the USSR for the placement of objects of diplomatic missions.

The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, then called such demands unlawful. "The Czech authorities' demand for rent, and even retroactively, resembles extortion at the state level and violates the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961," the diplomat stressed.