Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the plenary of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe via video conference on Thursday 13 October, just before the vote on a resolution on the political consequences of the Russian Federation’s armed aggression against Ukraine.
“When I became President of Ukraine in 2019, our state was experiencing pretty complicated relations with the Council of Europe. Then the Russian delegation returned to the PACE hall, in fact, there was an attempt to write off everything that Russia did against Ukraine [...], write off under the guise of stories that it was necessary to maintain dialogue with Russia at all possible levels”, said Volodymyr Zelensky.
Referring here to the return of Duma members to the Strasbourg hemicycle after 5 years of crisis linked to sanctions decided by the Assembly in reaction to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 (see EUROPE 12282/19), he added that the word “dialogue masked the desire to turn a blind eye to reality”.
The Russian invasion of 24 February 2022, on the other hand, triggered the “principled decision” to suspend, exclude and condemn Russia for these crimes against international law, Mr Zelensky continued, stating that such a move demonstrated the strength of “a real dialogue among Europeans to save lives, protect our values and preserve the values that make up peace” (see EUROPE 12912/4).
With this “real” dialogue, “Europe is stronger than ever”, stressed Volodymyr Zelensky. “So focus on whatever is necessary to prevent Russian terrorists from destroying our lives”, he said.
In the aftermath, the Parliamentary Assembly held an urgent debate on the Kremlin’s strategy of escalation in its armed aggression against Ukraine, followed by the adoption of a resolution adopted by 99 votes in favour and one abstention, that of Turkish MEP Ahmet Ünal Çeviköz (Republican People’s Party, CHP) who sits in the Socialist Group in Strasbourg.
The Resolution calls on the 46 member states of the Council of Europe to “speed up the establishment of a Special (ad hoc) International Tribunal to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine”, to “set up a comprehensive international compensation mechanism, including an international register of damage and actively co-operate with the Ukrainian authorities on this issue”, to recognise Russian political parties that voted for decisions encroaching on the integrity of Ukraine “as groups” that “share all responsibilities of the consequences of the aggression” and to “declare the current Russian regime as a terrorist one”.
Most of these demands had been made by the Ukrainian President in a speech in which he stressed that the Assembly would be “the first to call Russia a terrorist state”.
Link to the Resolution: https://aeur.eu/f/3lr (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)