The head of the State Duma Committee for Eurasian Integration has said that if Russia quits the Council of Europe it would only help those who want to blacken its image in order to “establish the unipolar world order based on blood.”
MP Leonid Slutskiy (LDPR), who is also a deputy to the head of Russia’s mission to PACE was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying the Council of Europe and other international bodies were passing openly anti-Russian resolutions in times when anti-Russian tensions “were rising beyond the measuring scale.”
However, the politician said that in his view it was wiser for Russia to remain in these groups and only in extraordinary cases protest against its enemies’ policies by suspending the work in sessions, like it happened in PACE.
“Quitting the Council of Europe will mean aiding those who try to extremely deform Russia’s image in the international political and informational space, who attempt to impose on the international community an image of Russia as an aggressor with imperial ambitions that ignores international law. In reality, the nations that are doing this are the very same nations that now try to slander Russia – they attempt to impose the unipolar order on the world and this order is based on blood, like it happened in Iraq, Libya and former Yugoslavia, like it is happening today in Ukraine,” Slutskiy told the agency.
The politician added that enemies wanted Russia to quit the international organizations and were constantly testing the temper of its representatives by constant slander and distortion of the facts. But he said that this was not going to happen.
Commenting on the recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights that ordered Russian authorities to pay almost 2 billion euro to former shareholders of the YUKOS oil company, Slutskiy said that this was a typical example of a biased ruling forced by the attitude to Russia imposed by the West.
“We are going to find some mechanisms that would allow us not to abide by this decision while retaining the respect of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights. Because if we don’t, such rulings and such enormous sums would rain on us as if from the horn of plenty,” the lawmaker told reporters.