Paris proved to be a liar, Zakharova said about the situation with the Russian journalist

Russia has been offering France options for resolving the situation around the non-issuance of a visa by Paris to a Russian correspondent for several months, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

"We have been trying for several months to resolve this situation in a working way with France. We suggested to the official Paris, directly to their embassy in Moscow, and to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs that our diplomats in Paris follow the path of a normal discussion of this topic. <> We offered different options, and at some stage France even took it into consideration, but then again dumped it at its peak and said that no, they would not issue a visa. At the same time, they knew perfectly well that we would respond," the diplomat said on Sputnik radio.

As Zakharova emphasized, even in this case, in Paris, "they showed themselves to be real liars."

"They started publishing this story and voiced it not from the position of Russia taking retaliatory measures for not issuing a visa, but told about some kind of inhuman tragedy related to the alleged violation of the rights of a Le Monde correspondent," the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry said, TASS reports.

Earlier, Zakharova reported that the French Embassy in Russia has twice refused to issue a visa to work in Paris to Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist Alexander Kudele, while Moscow has officially informed the French side that it is forced to take retaliatory measures if the aforementioned refusal is not reviewed. Speaking about taking retaliatory measures, the diplomat said that "the lot fell on the permanent correspondent of Le Monde in Benjamin Quesnel of Russia, whose accreditation just required a technical extension." She stressed that "there was no political subtext in this choice."