MOSCOW, February 20. /TASS/. Russia’s delegation intends to focus on the Ukrainian extremists’ attack on the building housing the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation in Kiev at the winter session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, head of the delegation and Vice Speaker of Russia’s State Duma (lower house of Parliament) Pyotr Tolstoy told reporters on Tuesday.
"We will be sure to bring this information to [the OSCE’s] attention. The mere fact is a symptom of the overall unbridled nationalist context in Ukraine, and we will talk about that too," he said.
For his part, member of the Russian delegation at the OSCE PA, head of the State Duma International Affairs Committee Leonid Slutsky noted that Russian lawmakers would urge the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly "to condemn the extremists’ actions who have repeatedly attacked the Rossotrudnichestvo representative office building and Russian bank offices."
"This time the vandals tore off and desecrated the flag. However, the Ukrainian authorities turn a blind eye to these crimes. Moreover, they are saying openly that Russian flags should be banned, the way President [Pyotr] Poroshenko did at the Munich conference," he said. According to Slutsky, "the OSCE should respond to that and urge Kiev to end such incitement."
On Saturday and Sunday, Ukrainian nationalists pelted the Rossotrudnichestvo building in Kiev with stones and eggs, and consequently tore off and burned the Russian flag. They also broke the windows of Sberbank’s subsidiary office and attempted to break the windows of the Alfa-Bank building.
Russian State Duma (Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has instructed Tolstoy to draw the organization’s attention to the recent radical assault on the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Kiev and violations of the rights of Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.
"State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Voloding has instructed head of the State Duma delegation to the winter session of the OSCE PA Pyotr Tolstoy to convey our indignation over the attack on the Rossotrudnichestvo’s building in Kiev to European parliament members and condemn this incident, as well as to raise the question of Kiev’s violations of the rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, including the Russian language ban," the press service said.
Tolstoy, in turn, told reporters that the delegation planned to raise all those issues and call on the OSCE PA to condemn the barbarous acts carried out by radicals. "The recent outrageous action conducted by Ukrainian nationalists, who assaulted the Rossotrudnichestvo’s building in Kiev and desecrated Russia’s flag while [Ukrainian President] Poroshenko was making hateful statements in Munich… all this is a result of the Ukrainian authorities’ encouragement and the global community’s tacit consent," he pointed out. "We expect the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly to respond to this situation since it is intended to protect people’s rights, freedoms and security," Tolstoy added.
According to him, "the causes for the events currently taking place in Ukraine are rooted in the authorities’ long-standing disregard for our common history, attempts to distort it and play games with nationalist movements and openly fascist organizations." "All this had led to a years-long civil war against the Russian-speaking population of the country’s southeast, the ban on the import and circulation of Russian-language books, the introduction of a total censorship and quotas for Russian-language broadcasts, as well as to the adoption of the controversial education law, which actually bans education in Russian," Tolstoy pointed out. He added that "calls for hanging and killing people based on their ethnic background" were a manifestation of fascism.