Russian Foreign Ministry: The legitimacy of the elections will be determined by the Russian people, not the ODIHR
A number of representatives of the Western bloc belonging to the OSCE, contrary to the purpose of the organization, are trying to use it to put pressure on countries east of Vienna.
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Grushko said this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, in an interview with Kommersant.
According to him, Russia is not conducting any consultations with the OSCE ODIHR regarding their refusal to send observers for elections to the State Duma.
“ODIHR has decided not to send its representatives to Russia; if the bureau comes to their senses and realizes that this decision is wrong, then you are welcome,” Grushko said.
He emphasized that the Russian Federation has fully fulfilled all the obligations it assumed within the OSCE and other international organizations regarding the invitation of international observers.
The diplomat is not afraid that without “certification” from the ODIHR for Western states, the Russian elections will be less legitimate.
“The legitimacy of elections is determined by the choice of the Russian people themselves. As for such a politicized attitude towards election monitoring, it is no secret that this is a tool of pressure on individual countries. We have been living in this reality for a long time. That is why for many years within the OSCE we have been striving to transfer the activities of the ODIHR to an agreed basis that would exclude the division of states into “teachers” and “students,” states with “well-established democratic traditions” and “unsettled ones,” the deputy minister noted.
“One can hardly agree with the fact that the ODIHR does not send election observers to individual states at all, while mass troops are sent to other countries. The activities of any organization must be based on respect for the principle of sovereign equality of states. Deviation from this principle, allowed by the ODIHR, undermines the authority of this institution,” the publication’s interlocutor added.
He also explained that why is it not possible to achieve the development and adoption of agreed rules for election observation for the ODIHR?
“This is part of the fundamental problem of the OSCE. The fact is that some participants in this association—member states of the European Union, the United States and Canada—contrary to the purpose of the OSCE as a security and cooperation organization, are trying to use it to put pressure on countries east of Vienna. It is important for them that the OSCE mechanisms are one way or another tailored to serve their geopolitical project,” says the representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The publication noted that even without the arrival of observers, the ODIHR will still issue an assessment report on the results of the State Duma elections, and asked whether Moscow is ready to listen to these conclusions and recommendations.
“How can we take seriously a report from people who weren’t here? It would be absurd. This will be a document from the genre: “I haven’t read the work of such and such an author, but here’s what I have to say about it...”. In other words, the significance of this report will be zero,” Grushko concluded.
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