PRAGUE -- Two senior U.S. lawmakers say Austria erred by issuing visas to the Russian delegation -- all of whom are under European Union sanctions due to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine -- for this week's meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, but it's unlikely a massive boycott of the meeting by the group's 57 nations will occur.
Austria stirred a controversy ahead of the February 23-24 gathering when it said it would grant travel documents to 18 Russian deputies to attend the winter session of the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly, which coincides with the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops.
The move, which Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said had to be taken as his country was obliged by diplomatic protocol to allow participants from member countries to attend the meeting, immediately raised the ire of many in the OSCE.
Ukraine and Lithuania have said they will boycott the meeting and almost half of the OSCE's member nations -- including the United States -- had called for Austria not to issue visas to the Russian lawmakers, with some threatening to avoid the meeting as well.
"I don't think it [granting the visas] should have happened," Steve Cohen, a Democratic Party congressman from Tennessee and a member of the U.S. Helsinki Commission leadership that will attend the Vienna meeting, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an interview on February 22.
While acknowledging Austria's reasoning behind the decision, Cohen said: "Nevertheless, Russia has violated every part of the reasons for this meeting to happen at all. And I think when a country goes that far, then maybe they shouldn't be permitted."
U.S. Congressman Joe Wilson
In a separate interview with RFE/RL on February 22, Joe Wilson, a Republican Congressman who heads Washington's Helsinki Commission leadership, said allowing Russia to attend the meeting sends "the wrong message to the world."
If the Russian delegation does show up in the Austrian capital this week, it will be the first time members of the Russian State Duma have been in the European Union in an official capacity since being sanctioned for supporting the war, notably by voting in favor of seizing the four Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya.
The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly has met twice since the invasion -- in July in Birmingham, England, and in the Polish capital, Warsaw, in November -- but both times the Russian delegation was denied visas.
The Helsinki Commission has noted that the United States and the EU have sanctioned "every member of the Russian delegation for having explicitly endorsed Vladimir Putin's war of aggression on Ukraine and his claim to have annexed vast swathes of Ukrainian territory."
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the OSCE has been careful not to completely sever ties with Moscow.
Since Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe in March, the OSCE is the only major pan-European political organization that Moscow remains a member of.