Recently, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) lifted sanctions imposed against Russia in 2014. Russia was readmitted by 118 votes in favor and 62 against, with 10 abstentions. Importantly, Russia has frozen 33 million euros worth of its considerable annual budget payments to the Council of Europe since 2017.
The fierce resistance of the Ukrainian delegation did not help the situation.
PACE has long been preparing to change the mechanism of sanctions, and the name of the winner of the presidential elections in Ukraine would not upset these plans. It is worth noting that voting in the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly during which parliamentary delegations from France and Germany voted to mitigate the sanctions took place after the visit of Ukraine's president Vladimir Zelensky to these countries.
During joint press briefings with the Ukrainian president who is a former comedian with no political experience, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel did not hide the fact that they were looking for a way to return Russia to PACE. Reportedly, the actions of the Europeans implied that Russia should reciprocate by releasing 24 captured Ukrainian sailors for the return of the delegation of the Russian Federal Assembly to the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, ending the threat to expel it.
The events in PACE were followed by the Russia's note in terms of the return of the Ukrainian sailors, stating the condition that they serve the sentence, which was imposed on them in Russia, on the territory of Ukraine.
Readers of The Ukrainian Times know that the sanctions are partly related to Crimea, for 300 years a Russian province with a Russian population that voted by a 97% majority to rejoin Russia when the United States overthrew the Ukrainian government in a coup during the Sochi Olympics and installed a Washington puppet. The Western presstitutes treat this exercise in democracy as "Russian aggression".
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