Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Three weeks after Moscow seated its new parliament, Europe’s lawmakers delivered an unmistakable verdict in Strasbourg.
The European Parliament voted on Thursday to refuse recognition of Russia’s newly constituted State Duma, branding the September ballot a “complete sham” and urging all 27 EU member states to adopt the same non-recognition stance.
The resolution carried 482 votes in favor, with 41 against and 39 abstentions. MEPs said the vote, held across Russia and in occupied Ukrainian territories on September 18-20, offered “no genuine alternative candidates, no free media, no credible observers and no political freedoms.”
Three conditions for any thaw
Parliament spelled out what Moscow would have to deliver before relations could be restored. The resolution requires “a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, based on full territorial integrity and complete withdrawal” of Russian troops as its first condition.
Two further conditions follow: the “release of prisoners of war, the return of forcibly deported Ukrainian children,” and “Russia’s payment of full reparations and compensation to Ukraine, and full accountability for crimes.”
MEPs also oppose “the normalisation of Russia’s participation in international sporting and cultural events,” closing a diplomatic back door that has run through federations and cultural bodies.
Fresh sanctions targets and a ban on contacts
The resolution calls for broader EU restrictive measures focused on those who ran the September vote and the wider repression around it.
The targets named include judges and prosecutors involved in political persecution, officials of Russia’s financial monitoring service Rosfinmonitoring, members of the Central Election Commission, individuals who organized staged voting in occupied territories, and those carrying out transnational repression against regime opponents abroad.
On the day-to-day business of diplomacy, MEPs call on EU governments to “refrain from any official contact with the newly constituted Duma and its members, and oppose the participation of such Russian representatives in inter-parliamentary assemblies.”
A ballot held in occupied territory
The September vote ran across Russia for three days and extended into the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the eastern and southern areas Russia claims to have annexed since 2022.
Parliament condemned the staging of elections there as an attempt to normalize occupation through the ballot box.
The text describes an electoral environment in which “critics of the regime” have been “imprisoned, murdered or forced into exile,” pointing to the systematic exclusion of democratic and anti-war candidates, including from the Yabloko party.
Thursday’s resolution is not binding on EU capitals. Each of the 27 governments must now decide on its own whether to break official contacts with the new Duma and its deputies, who are seated for a five-year term.
