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Blaming Russia for OSCE human rights meeting failure seen as truth distortion — diplomat

According to Alexey Zaitsev, Moscow clearly outlined its priorities and has been advocating them since the very beginning of the year when consultations on the topics and modality of the Warsaw meeting began

MOSCOW, September 30. /TASS/. Moscow considers US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement that Russia blocked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) annual human rights meeting in Warsaw as another attempt to distort the real situation, a high-ranking Russian foreign ministry official said on Thursday.

"We noted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement where he accused Russia of frustrating the annual OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM). We consider this statement as yet another attempt to distort the real state of things," Alexey Zaitsev, deputy director of the ministry’s information and press department, said at a briefing.

According to the Russian diplomat, Moscow clearly outlined its priorities and has been advocating them since the very beginning of the year when consultations on the topics and modality of the Warsaw meeting began.

"In particular, Russia insisted on putting the topics of counteracting glorification of Nazism and neo-Nazism on the meeting’s agenda in view of the aggravation of these problems in the OSCE countries. Apart from that, we insisted the meeting in Warsaw be organized in conformity with the regular practice, providing for equal and non-discriminatory access for all of its participants, including non-government organizations. We were dismayed at the refusal of the Swedish presidency and Western partners to take into account Russia’s proposals," Zaitsev noted. "Especially, it concerns the fact of ignoring the problems of the growth of neo-Nazi moods and glorification of the Nazi and their accomplices."

Moscow thinks that "with this topic out of the agenda, the meeting would be the very blocking of control over the degrading human rights situation Mr. Blinken accuses Russia of," he added.

"We would like to stress that Russia has done its best to find solutions on the Warsaw meeting. We interpret attempts to picture our position as disrupting the meeting as unfair and undermining the spirit of partnership and cooperation in the OSCE," he stressed.