Russia’s upper house to continue efforts for resuming dialogue with US

Federation Council, the upper house of Russian parliament will continue making steps towards resumption of dialogue with the US Congress, Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the house said in an interview published on Tuesday by the Izvestia daily.

She underlined the extreme importance of contacts with the congressmen and senators.

“We continue maintaining informal contacts with them,” Matviyenko said. “Very luckily, not all of them have fallen under the spell of anti-Russian propaganda.”

She recalled that Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Federation Council’s foreign policy committee had met with several congressmen in St Petersburg recently.

Russia was not the initiator of the current surge of tensions in relations with the US, Matviyenko said. “We defend our national interests and the fundamental values of world policy persistently.”

Among the latter values she named observance of international law, the supreme role of the United Nations and its Security Council, and the inadmissibility of meddling with the affairs of sovereign countries.

Matviyenko promised Russia’s persistence along this line in the future, too, saying however it ran counter to the US vision of the situation.

“We persistently speak in favor of dialogue, including the one between parliaments because the points of contact necessary for bridging the gaps in positions,” she said.

“Informal contacts between (Russian and American) business people, educators, cultural personalities, and activists of public organizations continue in spite of all the problems,” Matviyenko said.

She mentioned the Eurasian Women’s Forum will be held in St Petersburg later this month. Two of its guests took part in a Soviet-American Women’s Forum in 1990.

The fact they are going to come here again is a signal of moods of the people living in the US, not the Department of State or the Russophobes who at present set the tune to the US policy, Marviyenko said.

“I’m confident we’ll adopt a document upon the end of discussions in St Petersburg that we’ll send to the heads of state later,” she said.