Putin Orders Import Ban in Retaliation for Sanctions
World | Andrew E Kramer and Neil MacFarquhar | Updated: August 07, 2014 07:39 IST
What a dumbass! Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with local officials in Voronezh, Russia on August 5.
Donetsk, Ukraine: Searching for ways to hit back at Western sanctions without causing Russian consumers too much pain in his own country, President Vladimir Putin gave his government a broad mandate Wednesday to issue one-year bans of food and agricultural imports, but he included a proviso that the bans be lifted if they drive up prices or cause undue dependence on a single source.
"They are searching for some way to respond, and so far have not found a way," Sergei Guriev, a respected Russian economist who fled into exile in Paris last year, said of the Kremlin. He and others noted the spread of popular jokes in Russia about the country tending to shoot itself in the foot with retaliatory measures.
The move by Putin came as fighting continued to flare in eastern Ukraine between government troops and separatist rebels, whom Russia has been accused of supporting with fighters, arms and supplies. The United States, the European Union and other countries have hit Russia with sanctions, citing its seizure and annexation of Crimea this year and accusing Russia of supplying the missiles that rebels used to shoot down a Malaysian jetliner on July 17, killing all 298 people aboard.
As the Ukrainian forces pressed their offensive Wednesday, more alarms were raised in the West about 20,000 Russian troops massing near the Ukrainian border. In Stuttgart, Germany, the U.S. secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, said of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, "it's a threat, it's a possibility, absolutely."
The Kremlin rejected claims that it was preparing to send its troops across the border. Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that Western officials seemed to be trying to top one another with exaggerated claims.
The trade-ban decree that Putin signed Wednesday did not name specific products or countries to be banned, but Natalya Timakova, the spokeswoman for Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, said in a statement that a full list would be released Thursday. It will include fruits, vegetables and meat, she said, but not wine or baby food.
Russia has used trade restrictions to make political and diplomatic points before, and in recent weeks it has banned Ukrainian dairy products, Polish apples, Australian beef, pork from various neighbors and Moldovan fruit, among other products. Beef and cattle from Romania were added to the list on Wednesday, and the Russian news media has suggested that American chicken might be next. Technical pretexts were offered for many of those bans, but the new decree on Wednesday allows them to be imposed simply because a country has imposed sanctions on Russia.
Analysts suggested that applying the new decree broadly could lead to shortages and drive food prices up sharply, as banned imports from European neighbors are replaced on store shelves with products from much farther afield. Inflation was already a concern in Russia; Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that last year's rate of 6.5 percent was "bearable," but that a rise to 9 or 10 percent would be disastrous.
Still, there was a sense that Putin wanted to respond in some way to the more sweeping sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union last week, as well as measures by Australia, Japan and other countries, without doing anything that might rebound on Russia's crucial energy industry or its high-profile deals with companies like ExxonMobil.
"It started with a warning," Shevtsova said. "They will start with agriculture products and then go further."
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