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No, Norway has not frozen contacts with Russia

Erna Solberg's interview with a Ukraine paper has been widely spread in Russia.

Norway has not frozen all political contacts with Russia, as a Ukraine newspaper reported after an interview with Prime Minister Erna Solberg. “Sloppy translation,” the Prime Minister’s office claims.

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Many Russian media on Tuesday spread the news that Norway according to Prime Minister Erna Solberg had suspended all political contact with Russia. Solberg supposedly said this in an interview with the Ukrainian newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli during her recent visit to Kiev. “This is not correct, our politics have not changed,” the Prime Minister’s office says.

According to Sigbjørn Aanes at the Prime Minister’s office, Solberg’s statements in the interview have been quoted imprecisely. “Norway’s line stays fixed. It means that the military bilateral cooperation is put on hold for the time being, and political contacts are significantly reduced,“ Aanes says to NRK.

Aanes does not want to speculate over what consequences the wide spread of the interview in Russian media can have. “It is hard to understand why the translation has been done like this. We were first made aware of the situation when NRK contacted us. Russia must listen to what Norwegian authorities say, and that is that our line stays fixed.”

Political contacts on the national level have been at a minimum since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in February, except from Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Kirkenes in October in connection with the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Eastern Finnmark.  On the regional level in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region cooperation continues more or less like it has for the last twenty years. Both Sergey Lavrov and Børge Brende talked up the Barents cooperation as a continuing success between the two nations in a time when the political east-west climate is at its coldest in post-Soviet times.