Lipavsky: Time Has Not Yet Come to Resume Joint Talks with Slovak Government

Prague, November 7 (TASR-correspondent) - The time has not yet come for the Czech Republic to resume intergovernmental consultations with the Slovak cabinet, which the Czech Republic suspended in March this year, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said in an interview with the Czech Radio on Thursday. "We have contacts at working level, individual ministers meet as needed. At the moment, as I have also felt from my communication with the [Czech] prime minister [Petr Fiala], that time has not yet come," said Lipavsky. According to him, however, it is still true that the two countries have above-standard and very close relations with each other. In his view, these don't depend only on political representations, but above all on the closeness given by common historical development and people-to-people and economic ties. When asked how the current situation in Czech-Slovak relations is reflected in diplomacy, the minister replied that diplomats are professionals whose task is to maintain contacts. "So, on the working diplomatic level or, after all, in communication with my counterpart, this doesn't have any major consequences," he added. In early March, in response to Slovakia's stance on the war in Ukraine, the Czech Republic postponed the Czech-Slovak intergovernmental consultations, which are a manifestation of the above-standard relations between the countries. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala's cabinet justified this by disagreeing with some of the Slovak government's foreign policy moves. am/mcs