19 Oct 2017 15:14

Volodin criticizes U.S. for rejecting dialogue, including between parliaments

SOCHI. Oct 19 (Interfax) - State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has called the United States' policy contradictory and said the U.S. teaches other countries democracy while rejecting a key democratic standard, dialogue, including between parliaments.

"We say that dialogue is alien to a country which is promoting democratic standards and teaches everyone how to live and how to build democracy," Volodin told delegates to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Sochi.

The U.S. Congress has been uncooperative, and there are no U.S. representatives to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an assembly of which recently took place in St. Petersburg, he said.

"They could have taken part in the dialogue, right? Yet this country, the Congress of this country, believes they do not need this platform for dialogue. Mistakes are made whenever there is such an attitude to dialogue," Volodin said.

Sanctions divide countries, and Russia, on which sanctions have been imposed by the West, believes that "this kind of policy has a destructive nature," Volodin said, replying to a Cuban delegate's question about U.S. sanctions on his country.

"A policy in which one country dictates recipes to the rest of the world without even consulting its own people and, what is more, interferes in the internal affairs of our countries, leads nowhere," Volodin said.

"We want any issues to be discussed at negotiations with the direct involvement of the United Nations," he said.