“Protest notes were sent to the French Foreign Ministry demanding that the rights of a Russian citizen be respected, that the employees of the consular department of the embassy have free access to it, that representatives of the embassy were allowed to attend court hearings, and that they speed up the consideration of the request of the Russian prosecutor’s office to extradite Alexander Vinnik, taking into account his citizenship and consent to extradition to Russia, ”RIA Novosti quotes the ambassador.
In addition, he said that the embassy submitted to the French Ministry of Justice a request from the Russian Prosecutor General to conduct inquiries into the criminal case against Vinnik in Russia and to the presence of the department’s officers during the proceedings in Paris.
“At present, the investigating judge appointed in France in the case of Alexander Vinnik, referring to the secrecy of the investigation, does not allow the head of the consular department of the embassy to be present during interrogations of Alexander Vinnik,” Meshkov specified.
Earlier, Meshkov said that Vinnik began to leave the hunger strike and began to eat.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that Moscow will seek the extradition of a Russian from Paris. France noted that in the case of a Russian citizen, the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations are respected.
Alexander Vinnik was arrested in Greece in 2017 at the request of the United States, where he is accused of creating, without a license from the American authorities, cryptocurrency exchanges through which, according to the United States, billions of dollars are laundered.