MOSCOW, April 17. /ITAR-TASS/. President Vladimir Putin said Russia will not insist on its membership in international organizations, such as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, yet it has no intention to go for self-isolation or stage demarches.
"The world is developing intensively, and if somebody wishes to make it unipolar and build all organizations to suit himself, it's unlikely that they'll succeed," Putin said during a live Q&A session with Russian citizens on Thursday.
He acknowledged that "we often encounter the misunderstanding of our position (in international organizations)." "We won't insist on our presence in some international bodies, and we are not going to stage any demarches on purpose, we'll be working calmly," he said.
"PACE does not wish to see us? We won't lose anything," the president said in reply to a question about relations with PACE, adding that Russia would not go for self-isolation either.
PACE resolved on April 10 to strip Russia of voting rights and expel it from the organization’s ruling bodies until the end of 2014 for bringing Crimea into Russia.
Russia's delegation condemned the sanction as unfair and illegitimate, leaving the session discussing the move.
Meanwhile, Russian parliamentarians called for switching part of Russian's contribution PACE, to upgrade pre-school education in Crimea and the peninsula's Russian federal city of Sevastopol instead, and lowering Russia's level of participation in PACE.