Vivant Professores

Russian entrepreneurs, officials and leaders of media structures in the UK, called on President Vladimir Putin to revise the decision to close British cultural centers in the country. According to the British Sunday Telegraph, more than 150 representatives of the Russian elite signed under an open letter to the president.

The authors of the letter express the fears that the closure of British representative offices "not only damage the image of Russia," but is also "a blow to the interests of millions of Russians." The document states that over the past two years, more than a million Russians have used the services of the British Council.

One of the signatures, the 35-year-old NTV correspondent in Berlin Andrei Shilov, who studied by a scholarship at the University of Bristol, believes that the purpose of closing representative offices and oppression of their Russian employees was intimidation. “People are scared by the visits of the FSB and the tax police,” he believes. “The main idea of ​​all this is that Russia is surrounded by enemies, the number of these enemies is large, and it continues to grow.”

The representative of the British embassy, ​​commenting on the appeal to Putin, said: "We are highly appreciated by this support."

Since the mid-1990s, 2 thousand Russian citizens have received higher education in the UK.

Earlier, human rights activists of the Komi Republic tried to appeal the closure of branches of the British Council in the court of Syktyvkar. They filed a lawsuit against the Russian Foreign Ministry, but the court refused to consider it.