Merkel ally says G8 should temporarily exclude Russia
BERLIN (Reuters) - Russia should be temporarily excluded from G8 meetings because of its actions in Georgia, a conservative member of parliament and ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday.
Eckart von Klaeden, foreign policy spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) in parliament, said leading industrial nations should meet as the G7, without Russia, as long as it failed to work in concert with the U.N. to resolve the conflict.
"The West took Russia in as a member of the G8 grouping of the most important democratic industrial nations even though it fulfilled neither the economic nor the political requirements," von Klaeden wrote in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
"Thus, these nations should meet in the old G7 format as long as Russia is not prepared to find a solution under the framework of the United Nations."
European Union leaders will meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss the bloc's response to Russia's military intervention and its decision to recognise Georgia's separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.
(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; editing by Andrew Roche)
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