“We do not believe that this business has somehow worsened relations between Norway and Russia, it is important to emphasize,” RIA Novosti quotes Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Söreide as saying.
She noted that cooperation between Oslo and Moscow has intensified over the past two years.
On November 15, a retired Norwegian border guard who was convicted of espionage in Russia, Frude Berg, was handed over to representatives of the kingdom in Lithuania.
According to investigators, he was collecting information about the atomic submarines of the Russian Navy for Norwegian intelligence. In the spring, a court in Moscow sentenced him to 14 years in a maximum security colony. In early November, the Kremlin announced that Berg had asked for a pardon.