PACE on ‘vicious path’ turning blind eye to Ukraine developments

Russia’s State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee chief Aleksei Pushkov has accused the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) of inaction in the face of developments in Ukraine.

 

The legislator noted with regret that “no distinct position at all has been heard from PACE lately.”

He said that even the Presidential Committee of the Assembly, which gathered from May 12 to 13 to discuss attacks on civilians in southeastern Ukraine’s Odessa, had confined itself to general calls for close investigation into the case, where dozens died in fire started by Right Sector radicals and supporters from the Maidan Self-Defense Force.

“I think that the PACE leadership is following an absolutely vicious path turning a blind eye to what the regime in Kiev is doing, as a result of which it is getting more and more impudent,” Pushkov said on Wednesday, as he presented a draft statement by the Russian lower house of parliament demanding an immediate release of two Russian television journalists detained by Ukraine's military.

 

“The Kiev authorities do not even pretend that they are trying to keep to internationally recognised norms and rules, including the documents signed and accepted by Ukraine itself,” he said. “They actually do not recognise or implement a so-called ‘road map’ of the OSCE (the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe), which has been negotiated and put forward as a single document serving as a basis for the settlement of the situation.”

 

“Instead of this, the Kiev leadership has proposed its own ‘road map’ which is aimed not at negotiations but at violent suppression, and vacuous and stupid use of forces and heavy armaments against the civil population,” the deputy said.

“Sloviansk has become the only place in Europe in the 21st century where people have to hide in basements sheltering from permanent gunfire by Kiev’s military,” Pushkov said.

“All this is happening with the connivance of the US Administration, which deliberately ignores all these atrocities and human rights violations,” he said, adding that in doing so, the United States defied its own principles the country had declared over and over.