MOSCOW, July 25. /TASS/. Moldova’s withdrawal from the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is not in the best interests of the country’s people, Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Russian Federation Council (upper house of parliament), said on Tuesday.

"This can be seen as another anti-national, anti-Moldova step, which is not in the interests of the Moldovan people. It is just that the current authorities - foreigners with Romanian passports - in no way want to reckon with people’s opinions and care little about their views," she said.

According to Matviyenko, only close integration with the CIS countries can protect Moldova’s sovereignty. "But when NATO inspectors have already been invited to Moldova, it is clear that one cannot speak about any kind of sovereignty," she stressed.

Earlier, Moldova’s parliament, where the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity holds the majority, denounced the Convention on the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly that was signed in Minsk in 1995.

Moldova’s attitude to the CIS began to change in 2020 when Maia Sandu became president of the country. Since then, she has not attended any of the CIS summits. The anti-CIS rhetoric has only increased this year, with Foreign Minister Nicolae Popescu announcing the denunciation of a number of CIS agreements. However, Moldovan Minister of Economic Development and Digitalization Dumitru Alaiba said that the country should keep in force those agreements which are useful for the country’s economy. Minister of Agriculture and Food Industry Vladimir Bolea shared this opinion, saying that withdrawing from the CIS would be a blow to the country’s main industry.