MOSCOW, October 10. /TASS/. The West is using the Nobel Peace Prize as an instrument to achieve its foreign policy goals, a senior Russian lawmaker said.
"Russian President Vladimir Putin is absolutely right when he said that the award has lost its credibility. Today, the prize is yet another instrument used by the West to achieve its hegemonic foreign policy goals rather than a fair and worthy award for real peacekeeping efforts," Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the international committee of the Russian State Duma, or lower house of parliament, and leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), told TASS.
The lawmaker recalled that the Nobel Peace Prize is formally awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." But this year, the prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy." "A clear dissonance," Slutsky noted.
He stressed that Venezuela has an absolutely legitimate government that "the global 1% dislikes for its independent and sovereign national development course." "It’s more about the dictatorship of the collective West, which is imposing - including via this instrument, its values and priorities on the Venezuelan people, who don’t share them," he added.