Putin: Russia Did Have People In Ukraine Doing ‘Certain Military Tasks’
“The Ukranian government is imposing a moratorium on repaying the so-called Russian debt”, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a government meeting. “The people who go there had in their time expressed their solidarity with Donbass and considered it inappropriate to put up with the fact that Ukrainian military forces started to destroy settlements in southeast Ukraine”, Peskov said.
On Syria, he said the Russian military operation would continue until a political process begins and that he could not say whether Russia would need a permanent military base in the country, the Guardian writes. “From today, all payments shall be suspended until the adoption of our proposals or a court decision”, Ukraine’s prime minister said.
“We are ready to look at them”, he said.
Ukraine’s restructured dollar-denominated bonds stayed lower, with the yield on the debt due 2025 rising two basis points to 9.65pc by 12:05pm in Kyiv.
William Jackson, an emerging markets analyst at Capital Economics, said the implications of the moratorium were unclear.
That deal has seen countries accept a 20 percent write-down of their Ukrainian bond holdings, a move that has cut Ukraine’s sovereign debt from $19 billion to $15.5 billion.
The Finance Ministry sounded a more conciliatory note, saying in a statement: “Ukraine remains committed…to negotiating in good faith a consensual restructuring of the December 2015 Eurobonds”. On Friday, the International Monetary Fund warned that the program was under threat from apparent rejection by parliament of critical tax amendments and the draft 2016 budget.
This week, Putin signed a decree suspending Russia’s free-trade deal with Ukraine as of January 1, the same day Kyiv is set to enter a similar accord with the European Union.
Crimea, which was annexed by Russian Federation early past year, is suffering long blackouts after pylons that supplied the peninsula were blown up by unknown people in November.
Many – including the president of Ukraine and the head of North Atlantic Treaty Organization – interpreted Putin’s words as effectively an acknowledgement that Russia did send regular troops across the border to buttress Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine, a claim the Kremlin has always denied.