Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjorn Jagland is traveling to Moscow. During the talks, which will be held on June 19 with the leadership of the Russian Federation, he intends to solicit from Moscow a Russian contribution to the budget of the organization. This was announced today by RIA Novosti news agency Secretary General Daniel Holtgen. It is noted that the theme of the contribution is one of the main in the current relations between Russia and the Council of Europe. The contradictions between Moscow and Strasbourg began against the backdrop of Ukrainian events and the return of the Crimea to the Russian Federation in 2014-2015. Then Russian parliamentarians were deprived of the right to vote and a number of other rights at the sessions because of the position on the peninsula. Representatives of Russia proposed to fix documented in the regulations the inadmissibility of imposing sanctions on national delegations. However, the conflict at the end of June 2017 was even more acute. Moscow said it intends to suspend part of the payments to the budget of the Council of Europe over the past year, until the rights of the Russian delegation to PACE are fully restored.

The Assembly in this March for the first time recognized that Russia's refusal to pay the first third of its contribution for 2018 led to financial difficulties in the organization. The PACE budget for this year is less than € 17.5 million. The organization is forced to "freeze the budget by 9%" with a deficit of € 1.5 million. In April, Jagland complained for the first time about the shortage of money, said that without financial injections, the organization will last until 2020. And then he threatened with some sanctions against those who do not pay the fee. In Moscow, these threats were answered simply - yes we will leave PACE.