Kremlin justifies its tit-for-tat sanctions against western countries and allies
Source:
TRCW & Kremlin Press Service
YALTA, Crimea, Russia - Speaking at the Yalta meeting with representatives of political parties' factions of the State Duma, President Vladimir Putin justified the Kremlin’s response to economic sanctions imposed by Western countries and their allies against Russia.
Russian responses to Western sanctions are legitimate and justified, and most importantly, will benefit the national economy, the president said. "The Russian government has taken a decision to limit imports from countries that have adopted completely unjustified and illegal sanctions agaisnt Russia,” Putin said.
In particular, the president stressed the Russian sanctions are not just a tit-for-tat response and ways to support domestic producers, but also signify the opening of the Russian markets for countries that want to cooperate with Russia and are ready for mutually beneficial cooperation.
Washington and its European satellite ally EU, simultaneously adopted on 1 August the third package of economic sanctions, the so-called sector-focsed embargoes, against Russia and a number of its key economic sectors and leading companies.
Western leaders, including President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as anti-Russian hawks in the western the political, business and media establishments, such as Sen. John McCain, and russophobe commentators are not concealing the ultimate goal of their sanctions: to bring down the Russian economy, forcing it into a recession, which subsequently would instigate social and political protests in the country and further to the collapse of the Russian state.
However, the simple response of Russia, banning from August 8 for a whole the imports of certain food products from the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Norway, etc, have plunged the farmers in these countries into real horror, the worst nightmares as they are forced to watch tons of their farm produce rot for lack of disposal market.
Now these "poor farmers" and their myopic political leaders are panicky looking for new markets for their food products, such as beef, pork, vegetables, fruits, poultry, cheese and dairy products, nuts and several others.
The russophobe leaders of small European countries, such as Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, making making unruly bellicose statements about Russia and similar anti-Russian rhetoric from their political masters in Brussels and Washington have suddenly become inaudible since the Kremlin’s response on 8 August.
With a single decree, Putin has closed their mouths, giving them a more difficult and an almost impossible task of finding a worthy replacement for Russia, which enables EU/US farmers and grocery companies the opportunity to generate up to EUR 12bn and up to USD 1bn, respectively, every year.
If the anti-Russia hawks still want an economic war, the Kremlin has already hinted about its possible retaliatory steps to any future attempts to tighten the existing or introduce new sanctions against its economy by the West. Options on the table vary from the closure of of the so-called shortest "Trans-Siberian Air Route" to/from Asia, thus making transcontinental flights unprofitable for European and American airlines, to non-cooperation in the military, aerospace and other strategic industries.
And, finally, the probability that the issue of suspension, or even stoppage, of natural gas supplies to the EU is very small today, but at the same time, one cannot completely exclude that such a possibility, even in hypothetical case scenario, could be triggered under certain circumstances.
It is not difficult to guess what the ordinary Europeans who would be freezing in the middle of winter would say to their leaders, who mildly put and/or politicorrectly speaking, are just blindly following the United States on the Ukrainian crisis at the next elections. Unlike Putin whose ratings have soared to almost 90% on the Ukrainian crisis and his standoff against the West on all issues, from Syria to Kiev, the ratings of most western leaders are so low that were elections to be held today, most of them would lose their jobs.
So the days of these myopic leaders are numbered – till the next elections, which will usher in a new breed of foward looking leaders, especially in the EU, who will have the interest of their citizens as priority rather playing a “second fiddle” to the US on all strategically vital geopolitical issues.
If history teaches anything, it is that sanctions, especially those initiated outside the UN when they are global in nature and are supported by all countries of the world, are mostly ineffective. And even in the very cases when they are effective, those were only against the poor, weak and underdeveloped countries torn apart from internal rife and without a consolidated elite.
If the West forgets, these characteristics are absent in today's Russia.
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