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Russian parliament speaker hopes West will stop using Crimea as cause for confrontation

Russian parliament's lower house speaker said the current tensions in Europe are fuelled by an aggressive Western propaganda and an information blockade
Russia’s lower house speaker Sergey Naryshkin  Alexandr Shalgin/Russia's parliament press service/TASS
Russia’s lower house speaker Sergey Naryshkin
© Alexandr Shalgin/Russia's parliament press service/TASS

PACE’s January session disgrace to European democracy

The lawmaker said January’s session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will go down in history as a disgrace to European democracy.

On January 28, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) decided to extend the sanctions imposed on the Russian delegation during the spring session and deprived it of the right to vote and participate in the PACE leading bodies until April. After that, the Russian delegation suspended its work at PACE till the end of 2015.

Sergey Naryshkin earlier said that the Crimean issue was used as pretext to strip the Russian delegation of the right to vote.

“The point, of course, is not only in the Republic of Crimea,” Naryshkin said in an interview to the Kommersant daily, answering whether Russia’s deprivation of PACE vote was a response to Crimea's reunification with Russia. The State Duma speaker said that prior to that Chechnya was this excuse when Russia was accused of the Chechen developments that took place the 1990s, and other excuses emerged after constitutional order was restored in the North Caucasian republic.