Abusive nonsense: Alrosa chief’s explosive Kasane speech

With tensions rising in the tourist town, Alrosa head of International Relations, Petr Karakchiev, apparently delivered a hard-hitting speech riddled with words such as “idiots”, “nonsense” and sarcastic jabs at “profound experts” and “respectable moralists”.

Alrosa is the world’s largest producer of rough diamonds, followed by De Beers, which co-owns Debswana with the Government of Botswana. Botswana, as chair of the Kimberley Process (KP) for 2022, spent four hours on the first afternoon of the Kasane meeting seeking compromise between the organisation’s members on the question of Russia.