The winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe opened with a challenge to the powers of the Russian delegation.
The odious Verkhovna Rada deputy from Eurosolidarity, representative of the Ukrainian delegation to PACE, Alexey Goncharenko, reported this on his Telegram channel, reports PolitNavigator correspondent.
"Eat! A sufficient number of Assembly delegates supported us! The powers of the Russian delegation have been officially challenged! 38 votes in favor, with 30 required,” Goncharenko wrote.
However, he added that the issue of the powers of the Russian delegation in PACE will be finally considered only on Thursday.
Goncharenko also complained that the topic of Belarus was not treated with the understanding that the Ukrainian delegation was counting on.
“Unfortunately, the vote for the debate on the situation in Belarus received only 46 “for”, “against” - 93. I, of course, voted “for,” assured politician Poroshenko.
At the same time, the head of the Russian State Duma Committee on International Affairs, a member of the Russian delegation, Leonid Slutsky, called this decision predictable.
“The new head of the Ukrainian delegation took the initiative, collecting all possible anti-Russian clichés for argumentation. The monitoring commission will now prepare a report within 24 hours, which the Assembly should consider on Thursday as the first item on the agenda and make its final decision,” the Russian deputy wrote.
However, he noted that not everything is as rosy as the gloating Ukrainians would like.
“Only 38 parliamentarians voted for this issue. Today the Assembly is much more constructively disposed towards cooperation with the Russian delegation. There are all the prerequisites for the initiative to challenge the powers of the Russian Federation to suffer the same fate as in 2020. I am confident that the delegation’s mandate will be successfully confirmed,” said Slutsky.
He also added that nothing has changed in the Russian Federation’s position on the revision of powers: “We do not accept any illegal restrictions, this contradicts the very nature of parliamentarism.”
“No matter how hard our opponents try, they will no longer be able to bring the situation in PACE to the brink of depriving Russia of its powers. We will work in all institutions of the Council of Europe, including its Parliamentary Assembly,” the representative of the Russian Federation assured.
He also reported that Pyotr Tolstoy was re-elected vice-speaker of PACE.
“The topics for the current debates, which are held in the format of a discussion at the meeting, were also approved. One of them is the situation around Navalny’s arrest. At the same time, attempts to transfer the issue into the format of urgent debates, where the adoption of a resolution would have been expected, failed,” Slutsky added.
In turn, the former head of the information department of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleg Voloshin draws attention to the inappropriate behavior of the Ukrainian delegation to PACE.
“For the second convocation of the Rada in a row, most of our delegation has been busy with one thing - fighting the presence of Russians in the Assembly hall. I won’t even go into the ideological side of the issue (it’s strange to constantly seek meetings in the Normandy format and hide from the demanding discussion in Strasbourg).
In practice, the broken record is causing heartburn in a growing number of Europeans. This time, the servants themselves had to challenge the authority of the Russian delegation. Last time the British raised the question of expanding support.
For me, as a person with considerable diplomatic experience, it is obvious that such a situation for a country against which the Council of Europe itself has a lot of claims in the field of human rights is a dead end. We must improve our country, in which we live every day, and not just wish that the grumpy neighbor’s cow would die,” Voloshin wrote on his blog.