(INTERFAX) Moscow, 12 July: The European Parliament’s yet another anti-Russian initiative does not serve the cause of strengthening relations between Russia and European community, the chairman of the State Duma international affairs committee, Konstantin Kosachev, has said in an interview with Interfax commenting on a resolution on security in the Far East adopted by the European Parliament on 7 July.
“The document includes, among other things, an openly provocative appeal to Russia to return to Japan the so-called northern territories which, as the resolution says, ‘were occupied by the Soviet Union in the end of World War II and are at present occupied by Russia,” Kosachev said.
“We are not going to watch indifferently as some European politicians fixated on their own complexes in relation to Russia continue spoiling the political climate on the continent, let alone giving recommendations on solving problems they have nothing to do with,” he said.
Kosachev sees the European Parliament resolution as an indication of the fact that “radical and nationalist circles in the European Parliament who are irritated by the outcomes of World War II are becoming increasingly more active.”
He went on to say that representatives of those forces would like to see Russia not as a victor over fascism but as a country that has lost the cold war. If previously there was just sympathy to territorial claims to Russia on the part of individual EU members, now the geography of this activity has significantly expanded, Kosachev said.
“Clearly, European MPs are laboring under the principle ‘it does not matter whose claims these are for as long as they are claims to Russia,'” Costive went on to say. He added that support of “Japan’s revisionist claims” looked absolutely absurd “in the context of the issue of security in the Far East giving the title to the resolution, since any external pressure in issues like these can by no means serve the cause of strengthening regional security.”
At the same time Costive said he understands full well that the issue itself has little interest for “the anti-Russian faction of European politicians – behind this frankly unfriendly political act one can easily see those individuals on the European scene who are unhappy about the successful celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the great victory and who are made nervous by the Kaliningrad [Koenigsberg] enclave in the center of Europe.”
Kosachev said that “European politicians’ increasingly frequent political digressions into history make us show more attention to demarches like this.”
Source: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in Russian 0634 gmt 12 Jul 05
