MOSCOW, June 28. /TASS/. At Thursday’s news briefing Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova could not but use a pinch of irony while commenting on a call from the Council of Europe’s Secretary-General, Thorbjorn Jagland, for paying Russia’s CE membership dues by June 30, 2018.
"There is a good old saying: he who pays the piper calls the tune. We haven’t called the tune. What should we pay for then?" Zakharova said when asked if Moscow might change its mind on the issue.
"This is a figure of speech, of course. All of us are grown-up people. Hasn’t it ever occurred to them [the Council of Europe] and are they still unaware that no further development will follow until they restore Russia’s full-scale membership on the basis of their own documents? This is quite obvious. We’ve told them so more than once," Zakharova said.
The Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in April 2014 was stripped of its main powers over the events in Ukraine and Crimea’s reunification with Russia. In 2015, PACE twice considered the possibility of restoring Russia’s delegation to its rights only to tighten the sanctions. In response, Moscow refused to participate in CE activities on such terms and in 2016-2017 it refrained from sending an application for confirming its powers amid remaining Russophobic sentiment in Strasbourg.
At the end of June 2017 Russia declared it was suspending its CE membership due, because its delegation was not involved in PACE activities. Alongside this Russia suggested complementing the assembly’s rules of procedure with a clause no national delegation could be stripped of its rights. On January 11, the head of the State Duma’s international affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, said that Russia would not apply for a confirmation of the Russian delegation’s rights in PACE in 2018.