Russian official says Norway is releasing food for minors | Government and politics

BARENTSBURG, Norway (AP) — Russian food supplies bound for an Arctic coal mining colony have resumed transit through mainland Norway after weeks of tension, a Russian official said Wednesday.
Sergey Gushchin, the Russian consul general based in the settlement of Barentsburg, said Oslo allowed Norwegian carriers to pick up the disputed cargo and cross the Russian-Norwegian border with it.
“All these days there have been close contacts between the Russian and Norwegian Foreign Ministries. The situation has been resolved, a workaround has been found,” Gushchin said in a live interview on Russian TV.
“No one can detain Norwegian carriers on the territory of Norway. On July 5, a ship with containers left the port of Tromso and will come to us in Barentsburg on July 8 (Friday),” he said.
Russian officials had earlier accused Oslo of blocking a shipment of essential goods, including food and medicine, destined for Russian miners in Barentsburg, in the far north of the Svalbard archipelago.
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According to Norwegian media, local authorities in May stopped two containers carrying 20 tons of Russian goods at the only land border crossing between the two countries, citing European Union sanctions against Moscow.
Gushchin said there was no immediate food shortage in Barentsburg.
Norwegian media reported last month that the country’s ambassador to Moscow had been summoned to the Foreign Ministry over a complaint about the ban on transiting supplies to the settlement.
Hours later, a cyberattack temporarily took down public and private websites in Norway, which Norwegian security officials attributed to “a pro-Russian criminal group”.
The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Norway came two days after a similar attack targeted public and private websites in Lithuania, with a pro-Moscow hacker group allegedly claiming responsibility.
The incident came a week after Russian officials threatened to retaliate because Lithuania restricted the EU-sanctioned transit of steel and ferrous metals through its territory to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
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