FILE PHOTO: Russia's State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin is seen before the Victory Day Parade in Red Square in Moscow, Russia June 24, 2020. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/File Photo
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A speaker of the Russian parliament said on Sunday that the events at the Munich Security Conference showed that the European Union was incompetent, did not understand what was happening in the world and faced crisis.
The United States shocked European leaders by saying that Ukraine's place was not in NATO, that a return to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders was unrealistic and that Europe would not be at the table of peace negotiations with Russia and Ukraine.
In a post labelled "Hysteria in Munich", Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, said on Telegram that the European political elites only had themselves to blame for the predicament.
"The collective institutions of the European Union, represented by their leaders, do not understand what is happening in the world, have shown their incompetence and inadequacy," Volodin said.
Volodin said that European leaders had reacted with irritation to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who took a swipe at European governments for what he described as their censorship of free speech and their political opponents.
Europe, he said, faced a crisis but that change was inevitable.
"We can talk about conflicts and crisis phenomena that will accompany this process," Volodin said.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
