STRASBOURG (Sputnik), Daria Chernyshova – The EU sanctions against Russia create frozen conflicts, rather than contribute to crisis settlement in Ukraine, a senior Austrian lawmaker and head of the Parliament Assembly of the Council of Europe's (PACE) monitoring committee said on Monday.
"When we are only working on sanctions, then we have endless frozen conflicts," Stefan Schennach told reporters on the sidelines of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) summer session in Strasbourg.
Earlier in the day, the European Union decided to extend sanctions against Russia until January 31, 2016.
"It is very easy to extend sanctions, you need one-two minutes for that. But in the political way, I think it would be much more helpful, [for] the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Europeans, not the Americans, this is a European question, [to] solve the problem," Schennach emphasized.
.@PACE_President, at pre-session presser: proposal to be debated this week is to maintain Russian delegation's credentials for time being
— PACE (@PACE_News) June 22, 2015
Relations between Russia and the European Union, the United States and a number of other countries have become strained over the Ukraine crisis. Western countries have imposed several rounds of sanctions against Russia, accusing it of escalating the conflict, a claim which Moscow has denied.
