A special plane chartered by Moscow was on Saturday at Roissy airport to bring back to Russia Russian diplomats expelled by France because of the war in Ukraine, AFP learned from an airport source.
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137 passengers, “persona non grata” with their families and loved ones, boarded the plane in the middle of the followingnoon, which was to take off in stride, this source reported.
“The Russians sent a plane. Since they do not have the right to fly over France, this has been the subject of a diplomatic agreement. People are leaving under good escort,” the airport source told AFP.
France had announced at the beginning of the month the expulsion of 41 Russian diplomats who, according to it, were engaged in espionage activities under cover of their embassy, specifying that the sanction was part of “a European approach”.
Many other European countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Austria, Poland, Greece or Croatia have massively expelled Russian diplomats since the start of the invasion of Ukraine .
In some cases, these expulsions were officially supposed to respond to the outbreak of war in Ukraine by Russian forces and the abuses for which they are accused by Westerners. In several other cases, they were accompanied by accusations of espionage.
