Moscow Unlikely to Forget Lack of Invitation to Monitor US Elections

Moscow finds unacceptable the US warning of criminal charges for Russian diplomats if they appear at polling stations, and will not ignore the snub, if Russian monitors are not allowed to observe US presidential elections on November 8, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Ryabkov added that Russia chose to conduct the observations independently and not with the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as Moscow did not fully agree with some of the ODIHR criteria for drafting final reports of such observations.

"Our US colleagues should not think we will just forget this [being refused an invitation to monitor elections] and that in the future, if they want to monitor something like that in our country, we will not remember what they did in the similar situation," Ryabkov said.

On October 21, US Department of State spokesperson John Kirby said that Russia should have joined the international observation mission to monitor the US elections. He also said the State Department could not influence the authorities of Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, who earlier refused to let Russian monitors observe the elections, as these decisions were always made on a state level.

Russian embassy in Washington said that the Russian diplomats were not only denied access to the elections but also warned of the possibility of criminal charges if they appeared at the polling stations.