PARIS (Sputnik) — Mariani, a member of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee from Nicolas Sarkozy's right-wing The Republicans party, headed a delegation of French lawmakers that visited Crimea last week. He was labeled a "pro-Putin puppet" by leftist Alexis Bachelay on Twitter for the trip.
"I contacted police before lodging a complaint," Mariani told Sputnik. "Twitter’s problem is that it has turned into a place of groundless accusations."
This is not the first time that a delegation of French lawmakers has visited Russia’s southern Crimea peninsula. A French delegation visited the region for the first time last summer where they met with government officials and residents of the region, which voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia in a March 2014 referendum.
