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by Staff Writers Moscow (AFP) Oct 14, 2014
President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday he would speak to German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week about the cancellation of a key forum that has served to promote ties between the two countries. German media reported this week that Western NGOs had warned Merkel they were refusing to take part in a prominent civil society forum scheduled to take place in Russia in late October. The cancellation appears to be a further snub to Russia which is struggling with its most pronounced isolation since the end of the Cold War as the West punishes Moscow over its role in the Ukraine crisis. First held in Russia's second city Saint Petersburg in 2001, the "Petersburg Forum" is designed to bring together civil society representatives from the two countries and has often seen German and Russian leaders meet on the sidelines. Germany's Der Spiegel magazine reported this week that a number of NGOs wrote to Merkel and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, saying they would not participate in the forum in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi. According to the Spiegel report, NGOs including Greenpeace, Amnesty and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, said in the letter they "don't want to take part in putting up a Potemkin facade called 'Civil Society Dialogue'." Addressing Putin at a meeting in the Kremlin, his rights advisor said the cancellation of the forum was a "mistake." "When the situation is tense, when the situation is complicated, such dialogue is needed more than ever," Mikhail Fedotov said. "This is wrong, we should speak to each other. Our history has already seen an 'Iron Curtain'. We've seen this all before. Why repeat this?" Putin said he would raise the issue with Merkel later this week when he is expected to travel to Milan for talks with EU leaders. "I will tell the chancellor about it. We will see each other in Milan in several days and will talk." At the same time he appeared nonchalant, saying the German side believed it was best to postpone the event so as not to "harm this process." "Such is the logic of our German partners but I guess there's some rationale behind this." Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to say whether Putin had been scheduled to meet Merkel on the sidelines of the now-scrapped forum in Sochi. At their meeting on the sidelines of the forum in Moscow in 2012 the two leaders famously clashed over the jailing of feminist rock band Pussy Riot. 'Props in the Kremlin show' In past years, Merkel has sought to tread a fine line between expressing concerns over rights and the need to protect Berlin's economic interests in Russia. She did however throw her full weight behind EU sanctions against Moscow after a Malaysian jet was shot down over the stronghold of Moscow-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine in July, killing all 295 people on board. Germany's conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the forum "something of a farce." "The Russian participants were hand-picked and had close connections to the circles of power in Moscow," it said on Tuesday. "Thus it is more than understandable if the German partners do not want to become props in this show." Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier Tuesday it was counterproductive to prevent politicians from Russia and the West from meeting. "Nothing can replace personal contacts," Lavrov said. "We are fully in favour of these contacts not just remaining but intensifying," he told foreign business leaders.
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