Chairman of the Russian Duma Demands Apologies from the Georgian Side

Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin of the Russian State Duma, which is the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, spoke on the Rossiya-24 channel and insisted that Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili apologize for her Russo-phobic statements and renounce them.    

"The Georgian President, who publicly referred to Russia as an aggressor, should disown these words, apologize and explain her position," the Chairman stated when questioned about whether Russia received any signals displaying that the Georgian governance is ready to cooperate. "How can we advance relations when the Georgian leadership acts this way?" he asked.

Volodin stressed that the anti-Russian sentiment, particularly in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is generally instigated and further constructed by US “satellites - the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and Georgia." He said that if these countries were thinking about collaboration, they would never have made a ‘fiasco’ at PACE.  

Volodin recollected that relations with these countries started to balance out but then a conflict was ‘staged’ in Tbilisi, when the Russian delegation arrived to attend a session of the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy. "However, the Georgian President chose to denounce Russia as an aggressor instead of interfering and condemn the events," he said,pointing out Zurabishvili’s comments.

The Chairman concluded with a remark that other ‘US satellite states’ will bear the burden and warned that by fueling a conflict with Russia, these countries "will plunge themselves into enormous problems as happened with Georgia."

By Beka Alexishvili

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