Who says the Russians, increasingly isolated by the west (Europe and the US threatened over the past 24 hours to escalate sanctions yet again) and increasingly more welcome by China [6], India and the rest of the non-western world... [7]
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... don't have a sense of humor? Days after the speaker of the Russian Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, faced scathing criticism of Russia's
annexation of Crimean peninsula when he spoke at the Parliament Assembly
of Europe, he has come up with a novel suggestion when he asked a committee to study a proposal to condemn the reunification of Germany in 1990.
The logic: (unlike in Crimea) there was no public referendum to merge the two nations, which in turn goes to the legality of the most powerful nation in Europe, a nation, which however as the following maps demonstrate, is still quite divided in most aspects despite over 25 years of unity [9]:
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More from DPA:
Russian lawmakers said Wednesday that they will discuss a proposal to condemn West Germany‘s "annexation" of East Germany.
Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the State Duma, ordered the lower house of parliament‘s international affairs committee to look into the proposal from a Communist Party deputy, Russian news agencies reported.
The deputy, Nikolai Ivanov, said that the committee should prepare a declaration that condemns the annexation of the German Democratic Republic by West Germany. "Other than in Crimea, no public referendum was held in the GDR," Ivanov said according to the Duma‘s homepage.
Moscow made Crimea a part of the Russian Federation in March, after a controversial referendum that was condemned by the West for being held under the presence of Russian troops.
Naryshkin has said that it would be wrong to compare German unification with Crimea.
"By the logic of those who call (Crimea) an annexation, you can easily say that the Federal Republic of Germany annexed the German Democratic Republic," Naryshkin said on Sunday. He added that Russia was against such logic, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported.
East and West Germany unified in 1990, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The unification was explicitly approved by the Soviet Union and the Western allied powers who had overseen Germany‘s partition during the Cold War.
And, if that fails, there is always the matter of the Confederate South...
