The newly elected President of Montenegro, Milo Đukanović, is in favor of continuing the Euro-Atlantic path, but after winning the elections, he expressed his willingness to normalize relations with Russia, writes today's Moscow daily Komersant.
The paper writes that during the entire pre-election campaign, Đukanović presented the elections as a repetition of the Montenegrin referendum on independence and a vote for the EU and NATO.
"Such a comparison was justified in many ways: most of Đukanović's rivals did not hide that, in case of victory, they would revise the government's key foreign policy decisions, including joining NATO and joining anti-Russian sanctions, and some candidates even promised to review the results of the referendum from 2006." Komersant writes.
The paper states that the future president therefore evaluated his confident victory as an obvious confirmation of the majority of the population's policy of joining NATO and integration into the EU.
Dnevnik adds that in addition to 54 percent of those who voted for Đukanović, eight percent of those who voted for Draginja Vuksanović, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party who supported Montenegro's entry into NATO last year, also voted for the policy of joining NATO and the EU.
The newspaper writes that Đukanović confirmed his pre-election promises about the normalization of relations with Russia practically immediately after winning the elections.
At the end of last week, he announced that Montenegro is ready to normalize relations with Russia and that he will contribute to that as president, the daily reminds.
That Moscow is also interested in normalizing relations with Podgorica can be confirmed by Vladimir Putin's congratulatory message to Djukanovic two days after the election, Kommersant reports.
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