MOSCOW, December 11. /TASS/. Members of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russian parliament, are ready to resume contacts with Latvia’s Saeima if there is mutual interest in them, the chairman of the Federation Council foreign policy committee, Konstantin Kosachev, said on Monday as he met with the Latvian ambassador to Russia, Mari Riekstins.
Kosachev admitted, however, that the Russian-Latvian inter-parliamentary relations were at a low level at present.
"We are ready to restore contacts with the Saeima if there is mutual interest towards them," he said. "Let’s hope that our geography, too - and we [Russia and Latvia] share it - will be marked by cooperation in precisely specified projects and, hopefully, by good-neighborliness someday."
Kosachev stressed the dramatic restrictive character of sanctions in many areas, saying however that the restrictive actions like sanction never embraced cooperation between parliaments.
"Nonetheless, we see absolutely different interpretations of the situation [around the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions on the part of European countries]," he said. "Our parliamentary dialogue with some of those countries never stopped and it remains as intensive and useful as ever, while with other countries this dialogue is faltering."