2024-02-10 04:07:10
After Russian MPs caused protests last year with their presence at the winter session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (PA) in Vienna, they will not take part in the upcoming session on February 22nd and 23rd. Russian diplomats reported this, said a spokesman for the OSCE PA. The parliamentary delegation itself will not be officially informed until Monday, its leader Pyotr Tolstoy explained to the APA on Friday evening.
“The Russian delegation has not registered and the Permanent Mission of Russia in Vienna has informed the International Secretariat that Russia will not take part in the winter session,” a press spokesman for the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly said on Friday. So far, 238 parliamentarians from 54 OSCE participating states, including the Vatican, have registered for the conference. There has been no notification from Mongolia and Slovakia – these two states have not yet informed regarding their plans.
A spokeswoman for the Austrian Foreign Ministry also confirmed to the APA on Friday that the embassy in Moscow does not deal with visas for parliamentarians from Russia. Through the headquarters agreement with the OSCE, Austria would be legally obliged to enable Russian delegation members affected by EU sanctions to travel and take part in the event. When Austrian visas were granted to sanctioned parliamentarians from Russia last year, there was still criticism of the Foreign Ministry in Vienna in this context.
While the Russian delegation leader Pyotr Tolstoy only wanted to officially inform the parliamentary assembly on Monday and did not want to give the APA any information regarding the reasons for the cancellation, the Russian diplomat Aleksandr Volgarev had already spoken out regarding this on Thursday. “The ‘Ukrainization’ of the PA-OSCE agenda leads to a marginalization of the parliamentary format, to the destruction of the unifying potential and makes work in the common interest impossible,” argued the Vice Permanent Representative of Russia to the OSCE, according to his speech available to the APA.
In this situation, the Russian delegation would stay away from the winter meeting, he said. Russia will also not fulfill its financial obligations to the parliamentary assembly as long as there are no “solid guarantees” for participation and the safety of Russian delegation members at all events of the assembly, he announced. What Volgarev was specifically referring to remained unclear: In February 2023, the Russian parliamentarians were guarded around the clock by Austrian constitutional protection officers during their visit to Vienna.
Observers see the non-participation of Russian parliamentarians in the meeting as a further indication that Moscow is interested in dismantling the OSCE. The security organization’s activities in the areas of democracy, the rule of law and human rights are a thorn in Russia’s side.
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