Russian and European parliamentarians plan to visit Syria by the end of the year. The Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Leonid Slutsky said: "Europe needs to know the truth about what is happening in Syria, who really opposes international terrorism there. When our colleagues get back to Europe after our visit, they will explain it to their voters, to the European Information and political community."
Slutsky expressed the hope that such visits will continue on a regular basis: "Cooperating with the Syrian parliament, visiting the territories affected by the activities of terrorist groups, revealing the truth to the world community about what is happening in this country and about the importance of consolidating efforts to confront international terrorism at all levels and in all planes - there is no more important or noble task. "
The Chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs also said that Russian parliamentarians and the PACE lawmakers had already visited Syria in March. The Russian part included representatives of all four State Duma factions, the PACE group included the members of parliament from Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Belgium, including PACE President Pedro Agramunt, chairman of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Belgian senator Alain Destexhe, who has been International Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders for many years.
"While on our Khmeimim base, colleagues led by Agramunt highly appreciated the Center for Reconciliation of the Warring Parties created by the Russian Defense Ministry. They also noted the success of the Russian Defense Ministry in the political and diplomatic sphere. More than 1600 settlements in different parts of Syria have joined the regime of cessation of hostilities, and now their number is more than 2000," Slutsky said.
Speaking about other aspects of his committee's work, he noted that they were finally able to adopt a law on cross-border cooperation: "This law has been proposed more than 10 years ago and was endlessly amended by various federal agencies, the government apparatus. It was not always supported by representatives of various factions in the State Duma and the state and legal administration of the president. There was such a sluggish and rather hectic debate around the draft law that affects the interests of more than 40% of the country's population. I consider this law to be one of the main successes of the committee in the legislative sphere if speak about the results of the previous session".
Slutsky also noted the recent adoption simultaneously with the Israeli Knesset of a statement about the desecration of the memory of Soviet soldiers-liberators in Poland: "Decisions that provide a legal basis for the demolition or dismantling of monuments to those people who liberated Europe and, in particular, Poland from Nazism, thanks to whom the politicians who adopt such laws today were born - are inadmissible. It follows a perverse logic of those who are engaged in the heroization of Nazism today, those who publish history textbooks in different European countries, in particular in the Baltic countries, Scandinavian countries, in Poland, which minimize and distort the role of the Soviet people-liberator in the Second World War. In fact, the historical truth is distorted, and every year this process intensifies".
