Larisa Leontieva wants you to know that she is grateful for all your expressions of support
Larisa Leontieva has been put in touch with a lawyer who will take up her case, and has asked that I thank you for your words of support which mean a great deal to her because, the way she was portrayed initially, she thought everyone had made her out to be a bad person and a criminal when all she wanted to do was move back to Prague – that is where she lived before she came to Malta – with her son, send him to school there, and live a normal life. That’s all she wanted. She didn’t want to disappear or abduct the child. She wanted to live at X address in Prague instead of living at Y address in Malta.
Prague is in the European Union. It is only a couple of hours away by plane and there are regular flight connections. If Anthony Busuttil were living in the United States, or Australia, he would not be able to prevent the mother of his child moving thousands of miles and several time zones away while remaining in the same country. Prague is closer to Malta than New York is to Arizona.
In a normal situation, this would have been easily sorted out, especially because Busuttil – as he has made a point of showing everybody on social media – has more than enough money and time-flexibility to travel there every week if he wants to, or even to live there permanently at a separate address. So the way I see it, he’s the one who created this ‘child abduction’ mess because she wasn’t planning on abducting the boy at all, just planning to live at an address in Prague that was known to him, because it was where she was living when they met, and where he could visit. But she wasn’t allowed to leave him, and because she left him anyway, he reacted by taking her child away and then creating a media circus in Malta with the help of his lawyers.
Ms Leontieva is grateful, too, to the Russian community in Malta, especially the women who have gone out of their way to show solidarity and concern, and who have promised to stand by her in friendship whether she is forced to live in Malta as Busuttil’s ‘prisoner’ so as not to be deprived of her child, or if she is allowed to take him to Prague and start a new life there with him in peace.
Despite living in Malta for 11 years, Ms Leontieva has no friends here at all and none of the Russian-speaking women, who meet up regularly with their children for company, birthday parties, and the chance to speak their language, know her or even knew of her existence. This is because she was not allowed to have friends or social contact with others, but was systematically and deliberately isolated (in a strange land) so that she would have no support system and be completely dependent and vulnerable.
But as two of the Russian women, who are married to Maltese men, told me this morning: “She will have lots of friends now. We will make sure of that.” Yes, and fortunately she also now knows that Maltese society has not rallied behind Anthony Busuttil because he is Maltese and she is not, but rather the opposite. We have rallied behind her, with a few intolerable exceptions, all of whom appear to share his personality. His behaviour, now that the true story has come out, has caused many concerned Maltese men and women to email and phone me with offers of help and worry about her welfare and that of a child separated from his mother.
