Daily Journal:

The conference was initiated by the European Parliament and was supposed to be devoted to energy issues, security issues, civil society and the Kyoto Protocol. And yesterday it became known that deputies were denied entry visas to Russia without explanation. I know that a group of “refuse” deputies sent their letter to the Russian Ambassador to Belgium, they are trying to clarify the situation, and now a decision is being made on what response measures will be taken.
I cannot comment for the deputies; I think more detailed information will appear tomorrow about what these measures will be.
Recent events, including this case, show that this is part of some plan. Because if this was a one-time event - just a denial of entry to a given group of people, then one could consider it to be a mess in a department whose employees do not quite understand that such things can cause a diplomatic scandal. But if we remember that recently there have been constant scandals at the OSCE level that are generated by representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry, we remember the extreme reluctance of the authorities to allow into Russia those people whom they consider dangerous to themselves, we remember the recent scandal with the disruption by local authorities of an international meeting in Nizhny Novgorod , which was supposed to be dedicated to the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, it is clear that it is not just a mess. After all, among other things, we observed an absolutely boorish detention of citizens of other states, and as the main motive for the detention, we were first told that there was a violation of the visa regime, and then in the resolution to initiate an administrative case we read that the violation was that the person , who arrived in Russia on a tourist visa, communicated with “private individuals.” This is absurd! And this is written in the official document - one must think that a person with a tourist visa should either immediately go to the Karakum region, or spend all the time in the museum, preferably when it is closed to other visitors. After all, how else can you avoid “communication with private individuals”?
So the incident with the members of the European Parliament, unfortunately, in my opinion, is quite natural. Our authorities are so accustomed to the fact that they can do anything that, apparently, this time they believe that they can get away with it. But people's patience is running out, and I think the consequences could be quite unpleasant.
Oksana Chelysheva - director of the Nizhny Novgorod Foundation for the Support of Tolerance, columnist for Novaya Gazeta in Nizhny Novgorod