MOSCOW. July 6 (Interfax) - The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE PA) on Tuesday voted for a resolution condemning Russia's military presence in Crimea and restrictions on the navigation in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
The resolution was adopted in a 78-22 vote with 12 abstentions.
In it the OSCE PA calls on Russia to cancel the "illegal occupation of Crimea" and withdraw all additional troops and navy from the peninsula and the adjacent waters, which were deployed during exercises in April this year.
The PA also called for all restrictions to be lifted on the freedom of navigation in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov and through the Kerch strait and on approaches thereto in accordance with international law.
Finally, the OSCE PA condemns military activity and military conscription in Crimea and Russia's actions restricting access to Ukrainian ports in the Azov Sea and in the Black Sea region.
Meanwhile, the Russian delegation to the OSCE PA says that the very decision to put the draft resolution to vote was illegitimate because it failed to muster the support of two-thirds of the entire assembly (the clause was included in the agenda by 126 members out of the total 323). The delegation's head Pyotr Tolstoy accused the OSCE PA of violating its own regulations and walked out of the session in protest. A member of the delegation, senator Vladimir Dzhabarov, said that the rest of the delegation will log out of the videoconference.
"The Russian delegation considers the decision made by a minority of votes of PA members to be knowingly illegitimate, having been adopted in breach of the regulations. We will not participate in the video discussion, and we support the position of the head of our delegation, Pyotr Tolstoy. We are leaving the videoconference," Dzhabarov said.
Crimea, which remained an autonomous republic within independent Ukraine after the Soviet Union's breakup in 1991, became part of Russia following government change in Ukraine and a local referendum in 2014. Ukraine has not recognized its results and considers the peninsula its territory temporarily occupied by Russia. European Union countries and the United States qualified Russia's actions as illegal annexation and imposed sanctions on a number of companies, policymakers, and businesspeople. Russia has said the subject of Crimea is closed forever, and the peninsula belongs to it.