As the council was said to be monitoring how Russia fulfills its obligations to the organization, Yakovenko was cited declaring Russia had carried out large-scale legal and judicial reform over the past decade, bringing laws closer to western standards.

Now, as Moscow rejected further pressure, officials were said to be preparing for talks on the issue with secretary-general Terry Davis during a visit to the Russian capital on Monday.

Debate would center on the “abnormal situation” of the Council of Europe monitoring Russia’s compliance with obligations taken on when joining the council, Yakovenko said, noting Russia had fulfilled its main responsibilities and that “the potential of the CE’s monitoring mechanism is, in fact, exhausted.”

“It’s time to end the monitoring, and Russia is ready to discuss the remaining issues in a post-monitoring dialog,” he said, adding that the ministry believed CE standards should be interpreted uniformly across all member states.

Topics on the agenda include a focus on the need to destroy old stereotypes associated with Russia, notably on the part of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Yakovenko said.

In other observations, Russia’s defense minister Sergei Ivanov said recently that western-style democracy would not fit a Russia rejecting automatically copying western democratic models.

Commenting on remarks by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about Washington’s readiness to back democratic initiatives in Russia, Ivanov said Russia was moving along the path of democracy, remaining “master in its house.”

“Democracy is developing normally in Russia. It is not a potato that can be taken from one garden and planted in another,” he added.