Russian Riled By Parliament

Wall Street Journal

Members of the European Parliament may struggle sometimes to get their voice heard inside the European Union, but they’re doing a good job of riling their Russian counterparts.

Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the state Duma, contrasted the “realistic pragmatic approach” from the European Commission to the relationship with Russia to that it has with “the ideological institutions like the European Parliament.”

“There are quite a few people in the European Parliament who think the more they take decisions that irritate Russia the best it is for Europe. I’m not of this opinion. There is some kind of ideological wave which is unfurling over Europe, and it’s a very negative wave,” Mr. Pushkov told a group of academics and journalists in Moscow.

On Tuesday, the parliament adopted a recommendation calling on EU governments to implement sanctions on a list of officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a subsequent judicial cover-up and for the ongoing harassment of his mother and wife. The parliament recommended banning those people from entry into the EU, freezing their assets in the EU, and called on Russia to launch an independent investigation into his death.

Mr. Magnitsky, a lawyer who before his 2008 arrest was fighting a major corruption case, died in a pretrial detention center in 2009 after complaining he wasn’t receiving necessary medical attention. EU nations haven’t acted but the U.S. barred entry to a dozen Russian officials connected to the case in 2011.

This recommendation comes soon after the Pussy Riot punk rock band were put on a short list for the annual Sakharov prize awarded by the European Parliament for freedom of thought. The winner of the prize, named after the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, will be announced in December. Two of the three members of the group are in jail after staging a protest against Russian president Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral.

Awarding the Sakharov Prize to Pussy Riot is “not a great idea,” said Mr. Pushkov. “The less they say on these things the best it will be,” he said of European parliamentarians. The anti-Russian sentiment seemed, he said, to originate in Germany where, on a recent visit, he had been told that only people with views critical of Russia were allowed to speak on television. buy over the counter medicines займ онлайн www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php срочный займ на карту