Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman said on Monday that President Zoran Milanovic is a puppet of the Russian regime and that his statement that Milanovic's presidential campaign may have been financed by the Russians was taken out of context.

“One should distinguish between pro-Russian and a puppet. Milanovic is first and foremost a puppet of the Russian regime,” Grlic-Radman told the press in Luxembourg, where he was attending a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

He said this when asked to comment on his statement that Milanovic’s presidential campaign may be financed by Russia.

“Milanovic has never shown empathy towards Ukraine”

“That was taken out of context. Everyone spoke in the sense that there are indications that it is likely,” the foreign minister said, adding that elections must be transparent and that all election participants must declare their sources of funding.

He said that Milanovic had been against the government’s policies in Ukraine for the past five years. “He has never shown empathy towards this country and has never clearly condemned Russian aggression”

Grlic-Radman rejected the accusation that his statement about the possible Russian financing of the president’s election campaign was irresponsible. Milanovic had downplayed and questioned the significance of the recent Ukraine-South-East Europe summit in Dubrovnik.

“The summit was very different from how the media portrayed it”

He said the summit had been very successful and had adopted a declaration emphasising the need for the countries of the Western Balkans to align their foreign policy with that of the EU.

“It was very different from how the media portrayed it,” said the Foreign Minister.

With regard to relations between Croatia and Serbia, Grlic-Radman said that good neighbourly relations were in the interests of both countries.

He said he had recently held constructive talks with his Serbian counterpart Marko Djuric in which they prepared a catalogue of outstanding issues, including the return of archives, clarifying the fate of missing persons from the 1991-1995 war and promoting a culture of remembrance by laying wreaths at the sites of former prison camps where civilians were tortured and killed.