a Russian Foreign Minister Sergey LavrovHe was hospitalized last Sunday (13) after he arrived in Bali, the Indonesian capital, where he will participate in the G20 summit this week.
According to preliminary information from the Associated Press, Indonesian officials said that the 72-year-old Russian minister was suffering from a heart condition.
Bali’s governor, I Wayan Koster, told Reuters that Lavrov had made a “brief” visit to Shugla Hospital in the country’s capital for medical check-ups, but was in good health nonetheless. “He is in good health and after the examination, he left immediately,” the governor said.
However, on Monday (14), Lavrov denied the information that he was hospitalized due to a heart problem. He berated Western journalists for what he called false coverage.
“This, of course, is the height of fraud,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
The spokeswoman released a video of Lavrov, President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister since 2004, sitting outdoors in a courtyard, in shorts, a T-shirt and a T-shirt, reading documents.
Asked about the report, Lavrov said that Western journalists had been falsely reporting for a decade that the 70-year-old Putin was ill.
“This is not a new game in politics,” said Lavrov with a wry smile. “Western journalists need to be more honest – they have to write the truth.”
Lavrov, who arrived in Bali on Sunday night, said Western media routinely take a partial view of events and ignore Russia’s point of view.
The Associated Press did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the Putin ally’s allegations.
Lavrov is Russia’s longest-serving foreign minister since Soviet times, when Andrei Gromyko, nicknamed “Mr. Nate” in the West for his hard line, held the post for 28 years.
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