Putin appointed Alexander Bikantov as the Russian Ambassador to the TSAR. Alexander Bikantov, former deputy director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, became the Russian Ambassador to the TSAR instead of Vladimir Titorenko, who took up this position in January 2019.
Alexander Bikantov
President Vladimir Putin has replaced the Russian ambassador to the Central African Republic (CAR), the corresponding decree has been published on the legal information portal.
Instead of Vladimir Titorenko, Alexander Bikantov was appointed to this position. Earlier, Bikantov was deputy director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is headed by the official representative of the department Maria Zakharova.
Bikantov has the diplomatic rank of Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the second class. He was in charge of the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Titorenko became the Russian ambassador to the CAR in January 2019. He was appointed to this post six months after the murder of journalists Orhan Djemal, Kirill Radchenko and director Alexander Rastorguev in the Central African Republic. The journalists planned to make a film about the activities of a Russian private military company (PMCs) in an African country. According to the Russian Investigative Committee, the journalists were killed for the purpose of robbery. Dzhemal’s widow Irina Gordienko called the UK version unconvincing.
Prior to his appointment to the CAR, Titorenko held the position of Deputy Director of the Department for New Challenges and Threats of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, even earlier he was the Russian ambassador to Iraq and Algeria.
In mid-June, CNN, together with the Sentry investigative group, published material stating that about 2.3 thousand employees of Wagner’s PMCs are in the African Republic. The Foreign Ministry called the article a “propaganda salvo” and stressed that only instructors who do not take part in the fighting inside the country are present in the CAR. The sending of instructors is provided for by the agreement on military cooperation that Russia and the CAR concluded in 2018.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of April 2021, there were more than 500 Russian instructors and advisers in the CAR. Bikantov said that in addition to instructors, employees of JSC AK “UTair” and LLC “Abakan Air” work in the republic, which serve aircraft within the framework of the UN peacekeeping mission in the CAR, Russians are also represented as part of the mission itself.
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