Russian Federation to ban Ukraine food imports
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk has said his country’s economy has prepared for a Russian embargo, acknowledging that with Ukraine’s economic shift to the West, a few sanctions from Russia were inevitable.
Relations between Ukraine and Russia began sinking to an all-time low previous year when Kyiv ousted its pro-Russian president during mass protests calling for closer ties with the EU.
The Kremlin potentially has a lot to gain from co-operation, including the easing of European sanctions, which expire in January, unless renewed by the worldwide community.
Meanwhile, Ivan Starikov, head of the Russian Center for Economic Strategies at the Institute of Economics, said: “This decision is premature: food inflation is already over 25% at the end of this year, and the closure of the Ukrainian market will contribute to an acceleration in the rise in food prices.” . The purchase of eurobonds from Ukraine was paid for by the Russian National Wealth Fund, therefore Russia’s 2016 borrowing program would be unaffected, Oreshkin said.
“We stand side-by-side with French people, the President of France and the French Government in the fight against terrorism”, Poroshenko said.
Baltic and central European member states are anxious that the EU executive and west European partners may be preparing to let Moscow off the hook of sanctions over Ukraine in return for cooperation in the Middle East. In Kyiv, the Government drew different conclusions.
European Council President Donald Tusk, a high-ranking EU official, said this month that despite “some progress over the past weeks, it is clear that the Minsk agreements are not yet fully implemented”. On Monday, he said that’s exactly what he did during a “brief” conversation. Meanwhile, Russian Federation is now looking at ways of blocking the next tranche of International Monetary Fund to Ukraine if Kyiv will still allow a default, says Bloomberg.
Putin said that he had discussed the proposal with President Barack Obama earlier in the day.
But diplomats have also voiced concerns over ongoing corruption in Ukraine, particularly in law-enforcement agencies that have failed to bring any high-profile corruption cases to court.
He voiced “regret” that closer EU-Russia ties “have not been able to develop over the past year”.
Andrey Ostroukh in Moscow contributed to this article.