“Assistance with finding suitable accommodation can be provided, and personalized invitations to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum will follow in due course,” reads the letter, which was sent to a broad list of EU lawmakers.
Kartheiser’s outreach is controversial due to restrictions on cooperation between the European Parliament and its Russian counterpart. The European Parliament officially suspended official dialogue with Russian parliamentary bodies in 2014, while Russian and Belarusian officials have been barred from accessing the European Parliament since shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There have been 20 rounds of EU sanctions against Russia.
None of this has deterred Kartheiser, who traveled to Moscow last June despite facing expulsion from the ECR group. In response to questions from POLITICO, Kartheiser defended his St Petersburg trip — which he said was privately funded — saying its relevance was “undisputable.”
“More and more high-level European politicians call openly for a renewed dialogue with Russia on ministerial level, in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Croatia, etc,” he wrote in response to emailed questions. “So it is only a question of time until the EU policy will change.”
However, Kartheiser declined to say which lawmakers, if any, had expressed interest in joining his trip by a May 6 deadline. “I have a strict line of conduct,” he wrote. “I do not communicate any names, numbers or political affiliation. Indeed, participants might face negative consequences (as it happened to me) so I remain silent.”
Petras Auštrevičius, a Lithuanian lawmaker with the centrist Renew Europe group, called the recruitment push “an open attempt to recruit” MEPs “for working for Russia as informants, influencers and more.”