STRASBOURG, January 27. /TASS/. PACE’s proposed sanctions against Russia’s delegation are nominal in nature, Russian lawmaker, PACE Monitoring Comittee member Leonid Slutsky said on Tuesday.
According to him, rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on challenging Russian delegation’s credentials, head of the Assembly’s Monitoring Committee Stefan Schennach has proposed nominal, non-sensitive sanctions against Russian lawmakers.
"We could expect tougher proposals from the rapporteur. Schennach proposes, first - to close the discriminatory sub-committee in the PACE Monitoring Committee, second - to introduce nominal, so to speak, non-sensitive for the Russian delegation sanctions, giving us a certain time lag until the middle of the year - an opportunity to convince the assembly of the rightness of our approaches. We’ll use this opportunity. Because taking offence and slamming the door is the easiest thing to do," he said.
Slutsky said that had the delegation "received the continuation of all sanctions, as [Duma speaker] Sergey Naryshkin warned," the door to the assembly for the Russian delegation would be closed for a year at least.
"I think [now] we have a wonderful opportunity - we have a strong professional delegation - to work in all political groups, to really communicate jointly with the colleagues in the assembly with the population of Ukraine’s south-east and with Crimean residents and convince [PACE] that we are right. Such is the situation, but before making the final conclusions we’ll await the adoption of the resolution tomorrow [January 28] in the afternoon," Slutsky said.
He said earlier on Tuesday that if PACE adopts the draft resolution based on Schennach’s report, the Russian delegation should continue its work in the assembly. He also did not exclude the possibility of inviting representatives of the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the authorities of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) to Strasbourg. "And then our colleagues will hear the truth from the population of Donetsk and Luhansk, which is better than gathering information from the Western media," the Russian parliamentarian said.