MOSCOW, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday condemned U.S. authorities for refusing to issue entry visas to 10 official Russian delegation members to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly's 74th session in New York.
"This is an outrageous example of disrespect by the United States for UN members, as well as failure to fulfill its obligations as a country hosting the world organization," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Facebook.
She said that this new "act of neglect of the rights of sovereign states and international organizations" and the inability to respectfully fulfill international legal obligations will become the central topic of the upcoming conversation between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York.
Zakharova said that the visa applications were returned with an explanation that they had been submitted too early -- but they were returned too late to allow them to be resubmitted.
The U.S. Embassy in Russia has said that it was forced to delay issuing visas because it had to cut its diplomatic staff in Russia by 60 percent.
Russia cut the U.S. staff in Russia in 2017 to equal the number of Russian diplomatic personnel in the United States in response to a number of Washington's unfriendly moves, including imposing economic sanctions, expelling Russian diplomats and seizing Russian diplomatic properties in the United States.
