Duma views EU's personal sanctions against Russian officials as "a serious mistake"

The Russian State Duma views the inclusion of some State Duma deputies, among them its Chairman Sergei Naryshkin, in the U.S. and EU sanction list as "a serious mistake."

"Personal sanctions against officials, especially parliamentarians, are a serious mistake," Yury Shuvalov, a deputy chief of the State Duma secretariat and press department, told journalists on Saturday.

Parliamentary diplomacy today is the only reliable channel for maintaining unbiased dialogue between peoples of various countries, Shuvalov said.

By publishing the sanction list, the EU has in fact withdrawn from a dialogue on a broad range of issues and problems, Shuvalov said. "And the crisis in Ukraine is only one of them," he said.

Europe's artificial self-isolation and limitation of inter-parliamentary contacts is inconsistent with the representative branch's political role in the modern world, "especially in the absence of another legitimate force," he said.

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