The Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe supported the draft resolution on the report from Stefan Schennach, in which it was offered to deprive Russia of the voting right until the end of the year for the adoption of the Crimea in the Russian Federation.
This was said by Deputy Head of the Russian delegation at PACE, chairman of the Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Leonid Slutsky. Thus, the commission voted for the "soft variant" of sanctions. The offer from Robert Walter of the UK to freeze the powers of the Russian delegation completely was not approved. However, it is possible that it will be passed in a different form, as amendments to the resolution. The report on the credentials of the Russian Federation will be considered on April 10th.
Immediately after that, it was reported that the Russian delegation to the PACE reserves the right to leave the current, April session of the Assembly in connection with the possible deprivation of right to vote. The final decision on the subject will be made later.
"We reserve the right to protest against the penalty in the form of vote deprivation and leave the plenary hall and the PACE building before the end of this session, that is, before Friday. We will come for the next, June session," Interfax quoted the head of the Russian delegation Alexei Pushkov as saying.
He also stated that he strongly disagreed with the report from the Assembly about the Ukrainian crisis, which would be discussed on April 9th. "We do not agree with the content of the report. We believe it is subjective and biased. It says practically nothing about the activities of extremist organizations in Ukraine," Pushkov said.
According to him, the PACE goes on an extremely vicious way as far as the Ukrainian crisis is concerned. "They turn a blind eye to everything that does not fit into their concept of a purely democratic revolution," the official said.
Russian official believes that the Assembly turns a blind eye to the activities of such nationalist organizations as "Right Sector," "Freedom" party, whose representatives beat the leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine Pyotr Simonenko in the Verkhovna Rada. "I can only imagine what would be happening here, if deputies of the Parliamentary Assembly beat a representative of a political organization," concluded Pushkov.