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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14253/russia-eu-elections

Russian President Vladimir Putin is actively cultivating a network of contacts in EU member states with the aim of building a pro-Russian bloc in the next EU parliament, one that will be active in calling for the sanctions to be lifted.

Concerns about Russian influence have also been raised in France, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Germany, while questions remain as to whether Moscow tried to interfere in Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the EU.

Elsewhere Moscow has worked hard to forge closer relations with Hungary and Bulgaria, two former Soviet satellites that appear to prefer maintaining good links with Russia over their support for the EU.

As part of his effort to broaden his ties with pro-Russian states, Mr Putin is now focusing on the Czech Republic, where the Kremlin is actively engaged with the country’s pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, as well as Andrej Babiš, the controversial prime minister…. Certainly, from Moscow’s perspective, adding the Czech Republic to the burgeoning list of EU states and political parties with pro-Russian sympathies can only strengthen its efforts to undermine the EU’s efforts to maintain a united front against Russia.

No one is working harder to achieve a successful outcome from this week’s European Union elections than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Even though there is little prospect of Russia ever wanting to join the family of EU nations, that has not stopped Mr Putin from intensifying his efforts to expand his influence over those countries that are members of the European trade bloc.

Consequently, at a time when Moscow is desperate to have the sanctions lifted that have been imposed in response to various Russian acts of provocation, such as last year’s Salisbury poisoning, Mr Putin is investing much time and energy to ensure that a strong pro-Russian lobby is elected to the new EU parliament following Thursday’s Europe-wide ballot.

The EU, together with the US, has been at the forefront of the international campaign to hold Moscow to account for its role in the Salisbury attack in March 2018, when a team of Russian GRU intelligence officers have been accused of attempting to murder former Russian Sergei Skripal with Novichok nerve agent. The attack resulted in the strengthening of the sanctions originally imposed against Moscow in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as its interference in eastern Ukraine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14211/turkey-erdogan-armenian-genocide

“What Erdogan refers to as ‘relocation’ was actually the genocidal deportation of civilian populations –mainly women, children and the elderly — to the very interior of Asia Minor. These populations were not simply relocated to another place, contrary to what the Turkish state claims. They were sent to concentration and extermination camps or remote places in the interior to be slaughtered or to die from exposure, exhaustion, hunger or epidemics — either on the way to, or at the place of, their destinations.” — Vasileios Meichanetsidis, an Athens-based genocide scholar and editor of the 2012 book, The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, in an interview with Gatestone Institute.

At a symposium in Ankara on April 24 — the 104th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeated his distortion and denial of the 1915 mass murder of Christians at the hands of Ottoman Turks. “The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period,” Erdogan said. This quote was then posted on the official “Turkish Presidency” Twitter page.

“Erdogan’s statement was factually flawed, deceptive and insulting,” Vicken Babkenian, an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told Gatestone in a recent interview.