Russian, Ukrainian lawmakers to meet on April 11
MOSCOW. April 10 (Interfax) - Thursday's Council of Europe resolution on Russia will not affect a plan for talks between Russian and Ukrainian lawmakers on Friday at another international organization, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the head of the Russian delegation to the OSCE Assembly said.
The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) passed a resolution on Thursday suspending the voting rights of the Russian delegation and excluding it from PACE's leading bodies.
"The OSCE takes a very responsible attitude to its mission, unlike PACE, and especially unlike the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO. The latter have shown themselves in a negative light and have chosen what isn't the best of paths, the path of confrontation," the leader of the Russian delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Nikolai Kovalyov, a member of the ruling United Russia party, told Interfax.
"I believe that it is an extremely important function of a parliamentarian to analyze and discuss in the parliamentary diplomacy format problems that have accumulated. We are planning to meet with our Ukrainian partners on Friday in order to map out ways out of the crisis," he said.
Another Russian representative at Friday's meeting, to be held in Vienna, would be Oleg Lebedev of United Russia, chairman of the "group of friendship" between Russian and Ukrainian parliament deputies, Kovalyov said.
Kovalyov played down the PACE resolution. "We have always been in a minority there. If you take a realistic view, we have never had any voting rights there anyway, and the majority in PACE has always been putting through the decisions it needed," he said.
At the same time, there are signs of an emergent "sober-minded realization that PACE will be lifeless without Russia: there'll be nothing to discuss nor will there be anything to live on," he claimed.
