MOSCOW. April 18 (Interfax) - The ambassadors of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada have been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday, the ministry said in a statement.
"The ambassadors of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada were summoned to the Foreign Ministry due to flagrant interference in Russia's internal affairs and activity inconsistent with their diplomatic status," it said.
On April 17, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that the statements by the ambassadors of the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada made after the sentencing of opposition activist and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is recognized as a foreign agent in Russia, are interference in Russia's internal affairs.
"It's direct interference in the internal affairs of Russia," Zakharova said in a statement on the Foreign Ministry's website on Monday.
"These actions cannot be called anything but an attempt to put pressure on the Russian justice system," she said.
On Monday, the Moscow City Court sentenced Kara-Murza to 25 years in a high-security penal colony, finding him guilty of high treason, work for an undesirable organization and dissemination of fakes about the Russian Armed Forces. He was also fined 400,000 rubles and banned from journalism for seven years. Diplomats from more than 20 countries attended the court hearing. After the hearing, diplomats from the UK, the U.S. and Canada condemned the sentence and called for Kara-Murza's release.