President Zoran Milanovic said on Tuesday Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic's citing the epidemiological situation as the reason not to attend a commemoration for the Jasenovac victims with him on Thursday was another "clumsy excuse."

“Plenkovic is once again clumsily shunning joint attendance at a commemoration and is citing ‘epidemiological reasons’, claiming the decision is not up to him. Who is it up to then? The minister? What a brilliant permeable membrane! Lets in only what suits him,” Milanovic said in a Facebook post.

The Office of the President earlier in the day said that Milanovic and his delegation would lay wreaths at the Stone Flower monument at Jasenovac at 11 a.m. on Thursday and that it had not received a reply from the government or the parliament to its invitation to pay tribute to the Jasenovac victims together.

“As early as last Friday the President of the Republic proposed to the Prime Minister and the Parliament Speaker that they all pay tribute to the Jasenovac victims together, but we have not received any reply,” Milanovic’s spokesman Nikola Jelic said.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said today that a government delegation would lay a wreath at Jasenovac at 9 am, again dismissing the possibility of paying tribute together with Milanovic, noting that “there is no reason for us to put on an act.”

“The ace is telling us that ‘it was not him (them) who started the ‘animal farm’ and insults and that there is no need to put on an act,” Milanovic says in his post.

Resenting Plenkovic’s “poor knowledge and understanding of the spirit of the Croatian language” and his “intuitive tendency” to use Communist-era “metaphors and metonymies”, Milanovic notes, “First of all, Plenkovic is simply lying.”

He goes on to say that before Plenkovic’s arrival at the helm of the HDZ party, to say that someone is lying was reserved primarily for “political nobodies” and was unbefitting top politicians.

“We were often heavy-handed but we wore Olympic gloves. He and Njonjo (Wuss) (Parliament Speaker Gordan Jandrokovic) have contaminated public discourse in Croatia like nobody else before. Animal farm is a simple allegory. There are no swear words in it, to be fair. Only a creepy sense of a single-party state where anyone who thinks and speaks differently is treated as ‘scum’ and ‘oaf’,” he said in an allusion to the expression and pun used at one time by Jandrokovic and Plenkovic in altercations with members of parliament Nikola Grmoja and Miro Bulj.