Duma speaker proposes calling int'l conference on Ukraine
MOSCOW. June 23 (Interfax) - Russian State Duma Chairman Sergei Naryshkin said he proposed calling an international conference to discuss the situation in Ukraine.
"The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly opens in Baku in several days. The Russian parliamentary delegation will promote the idea proposed earlier by the State Duma to create an international contact group on Ukraine at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and I think that it will be appropriate to raise the question of calling a special international conference on Ukraine," Naryshkin said at the Open Tribune meeting on modern security structure and international law, challenges and tendencies, which is being held in the State Duma on Monday.
International community should think seriously about not just using existing traditional means to resolve conflicts but also searching and creating new instruments able to preserve the international law institutions and contemporary architecture of the international global security, the speaker said.
"It is evident now for many people that the crisis in Ukraine could be resolved and peace could be restored only amid international participation," Naryshkin said.
"Many years of the protest movement in Ukraine have brought its bitter fruits," Naryshkin said. Besides constructive opposition radical forces, which have felt impunity, have been enhanced too, he said.
"As a result of the February revolt in Kyiv a group of fortune-seekers, which unleashed civil war against their own nation, came to power," the Duma speaker said.
In the past several months certain state institutions were undermined and even destroyed, he said.
Civil war continues in southeastern Ukraine and authorities use heavy arms and aviation against militia and civilians, civilian facilities and people die every day, Naryshkin said.
It is unacceptable that the tragedy in Odessa and other crimes are not investigated and no one in Kyiv is in a hurry to bring those guilty to trial, he said.
If we analyze the situation in Ukraine further, "politically motivated pursuits of any real opposition are being continued, Russian reporters are arrested, tortured and, unfortunately, killed, and our diplomatic missions are subject to various provocations," Naryshkin said.
"We have repeatedly warned that, of course, amid such conditions it is impossible to start real and wide public dialogue, which can not be substituted by three round tables held in a hurry several weeks prior to the presidential elections and with very dubious representations at that," he said.