SKOPJE, NORTH MACEDONIA — SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) — NATO member North Macedonia said Friday it would briefly lift a ban on flights from Russia next week, allowing Russia’s foreign minister foreigners Sergei Lavrov to attend an international conference in the country if he accepted the invitation.
A government statement said this window would apply from November 29 to December 1, when North Macedonia will host a meeting of foreign ministers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in the capital, Skopje.
Russia is one of the 57 members of the OSCE, created during the Cold War to ease tensions between East and West, and of which North Macedonia currently holds the rotating presidency. Most European countries banned flights from Russia after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
It was unclear whether Lavrov would even accept the invitation that North Macedonia’s Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani said last week had been sent to him.
If so, the government statement released Friday said North Macedonia’s foreign and defense ministries would have to issue additional permits for the visit.
The statement said the brief suspension of the flight ban is not without precedent, “especially when it comes to international conferences.”
To reach this small landlocked Balkan country, the Russian delegation would have to fly over the airspace of other NATO or European Union members, who would in turn have to grant special permission.
With the exception of Belarus, a close ally of Moscow, Lavrov has not visited any European country since the start of the war in Ukraine. He visited NATO member Turkey, where Russian flights are not banned, as well as the United States, where he attended meetings at UN headquarters.
In March last year, Lavrov was barred from traveling to Geneva for a United Nations conference after European Union members banned Russian planes from the skies as part of deadly sanctions against Moscow.
He denounced the move as “scandalous” in a video speech to the UN session, accusing “EU countries of trying to avoid frank face-to-face dialogue or direct contact intended to help identify policy solutions to pressing international problems.”
In October, Osmani said Moscow could expect more diplomatic pressure from the OSCE in the coming months during his country’s presidency of the organization, which ends on December 31.