Sovereignty a life or death issue for Russia – top MP

Many EU nations have lost their agency, but Moscow cannot afford to follow this path, Vyacheslav Volodin has said

Russia’s survival is impossible without sovereignty and everything must be done to protect it, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Speaker of the Russian parliament’s lower chamber, has said.

Volodin stressed the importance of maintaining Moscow's ability to make independent decisions about its future, during an interview with Russia 24 on Saturday.

"For our country, being a sovereign state is not just crucial - it is existential. The loss of sovereignty equates to the loss of the nation,” he stressed.

According to the State Duma Speaker, many European countries and the EU as a whole have no agency anymore and are being guided by decisions made by others, notably the US.

"Europe has largely lost its sovereignty. We see this in decisions made by the US, which are often unfriendly towards European nations,” he stressed.

Due to those steps by Washington, some EU states have started to “experience significant economic decline, with businesses shutting down and people losing their jobs,” he explained, adding that “NATO bases are being built on their soil,” Volodin explained.

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Russia cannot allow itself to follow a similar path because “it is a huge country, and for us sovereignty is a life-or-death issue,” he said.

"If we want to plan our future ourselves, we need to protect it [sovereignty], take care of the security of the state, improve the quality of life of people, develop the economy, and think about technological and digital sovereignty,” the speaker explained.

Earlier this month, Russia’s Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) named “sovereignty” as the state word of the year in the country. The choice was based on the analysis of speeches by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the government’s strategic planning documents, it said.

During his end-of-the-year press conference last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that Russia “has grown stronger and become a truly sovereign state, and we will make decisions without looking at other people’s opinions, only with our national interests in mind.” According to Putin, those developments mean that the country has now “largely achieved the state we wanted to achieve.”