Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a rare apology to his Serbian counterpart over a post by the foreign affairs ministry’s spokeswoman which appeared to compare Aleksandar Vicic to Sharon Stone’s racy Basic Instinct character.
Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, posted a picture of Vucic’s meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House last week with a picture of Sharon Stone’s legs from the Basic Instinct movie underneath.
In the particular scene, Sharon Stone’s character is being interrogated by police and briefly uncrosses her legs, exposing herself.
Zakharova wrote in the post: “If you are invited to the White House but your chair stands like you are in an interrogation, you should sit like in picture number 2. Whoever you are. Just trust me”.
She apologised two days later by updating the post, saying that it had been “misinterpreted”. She added that she meant to criticise the “arrogant attitude” of the US administration.
Vucic, who held a telephone conversation with Putin on Thursday, later told Serbian television that both the Russian leader and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, had personally apologised to him.
“President Putin never apologized to me for anything and even Sergei Lavrov, but because of this post, both did, even though I didn’t even mention it and as a polite person I would never have mentioned it,” he said.
He added that for him this was nothing but “a passing incident and not an important one”.