MOSCOW, May 22./TASS/. Canada’s decision against issuing visas to the Russian delegation that was to participate in a session of the Operational Experts Group of the Proliferation Security Initiative "is openly unfriendly," the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

The ministry qualified this move as "openly unfriendly and being at variance with a normal practice of holding multilateral events".

"It is regrettable that the official Ottawa, which is fanning hysteria for domestic political considerations, is fighting against common sense, trying to assume without prior arrangement the right to determine who has and who doesn’t have the right to participate in an important multilateral event, which it happens to hosts," the ministry said.

"We would like to mention that as a key partner in fight against the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a full participant in the Proliferation Security Initiative and does not need any Canadian ‘favor’ in this respect," the ministry noted.

"The problem of non-proliferation is a too serious sphere of international cooperation," the ministry said. "Settling narrow-minded political accounts, in which the government of Stephen Harper has been enthusiastically involved over the recent time, is inappropriate and counterproductive," it said, adding that a hostile act "will certainly not remain unanswered".