ULAN-BATOR, September 16. /TASS/. All dialogue formats in the Parliamentary Assembly (PA) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should be engaged to settle the Ukrainian crisis, the speaker of the Russian lower house of parliament told a PA session in Mongolia’s Ulan-Bator on Wednesday.
"I am confident that work towards overcoming the Ukrainian crisis should proceed in all dialogue formats," Sergey Naryshkin said, marking that the Minsk agreements should remain the basis in that.
Giving credit to the OSCE, he said "this is almost the only common platform where the way the situation [in Ukraine] could be normalized is still discussed." The State Duma speaker marked that it was the OSCE that had deployed a special monitoring mission and participated in the Contact Group for the settlement in Ukraine.
"And what about our Assembly? It has been more than a year since Russia’s initiative to set up an inter-parliamentary contact group for Ukraine was approved in Baku," he noted.
"I am confident that the group could be set up if most members of the Assembly paid due attention to that," he said, also noting that it would be expedient to work in the parliamentary Normandy format.
Naryshkin thanked Parliamentary Assembly President Ilkka Kanerva and his colleagues for supporting the initiative to set up a contact group on Ukraine, regretting that the Ukrainian side has so far failed to show its will to cooperate.