Vladimir Putin orders import ban in retaliation for US & EU sanctions
Posted On Thursday, 07 Aug 2014 By
Barmon Roy. Under
International political news
CORPORATE PRESS RELEASES (INDIA) referral newsdesk, August 07,2014
SOURCE :: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/vladimir-putin-orders-import-ban-in-retaliation-for-us-eu-sanctions/articleshow/39814890.cms

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 on Wednesday, more alarms were raised in the West about 20,000 Russian troops massing near the Ukrainian border. In Stuttgart, Germany, the US 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. Major General 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 on 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 impos ..
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 per cent was “bearable,” but that a rise to 9 or 10 per cent 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.”
In Ukraine, intensified fighting near Donetsk, the main rebel stronghold, caused a Dutch team of investigators working at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to withdraw on Wednesday, saying the area had become too dangerous.
Government forces bombed Donetsk from the air for the first time overnight, jangling the already badly frayed nerves of the city’s residents. The roar of jets and the crack of explosions could be heard as the bombs dug a line of large craters across a district of warehouses and auto repair shops. It was not clear what the intended target was.
One of the bombs failed to explode. Two grim-faced members of a bomb squad took turns Wednesday morning digging it out of a hole in the pavement.
While many residents in eastern Ukraine have cheered the advance of government troops – after the arbitrary arrests and raw brutality of the separatist forces – they are also terrified by the artillery and heavy weapons the army is using, and baffled by denials from the Ukrainian military that it is firing into residential areas.
After the bombs fell on Wednesday, a military spokesman in Kiev, Andrei Lysenko, said the Ukrainian air force had not struck Donetsk. “The Ukrainian aviation does not bomb” populated areas, he told reporters. If a warplane was heard over the city, he insisted, it must have been a reconnaissance and communications flight.
But Tamara Matuznaya, a retired woman whose house in Donetsk was narrowly missed by a bomb, said that at the first roar of jets overhead, her son “picked me up and threw me in the basement,” and they cowered there as explosions echoed outside.
Ukrainian government forces have been working to tighten their encirclement of Donetsk and cut off supply routes from the Russian border or the other main rebel stronghold, Luhansk. As the fighting creeps closer to Donetsk, the army has aimed artillery fire at rebel positions in the city but has not yet moved in with ground troops.
Civilians are bearing the brunt of the violence, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday in a report on the conflict here. And emergency workers have been thwarted by separatists who commandeer ambulances to move fighters about the city, the report said.===========================