If Ukraine does not pay for Russian gas in advance, Russia's gas-producing giant Gazprom will deliver only the amount of gas Ukraine has already purchased, the company's chief executive Alexey Miller said last weekend. Miller also said that even if Ukraine applied to the Stockholm Arbitration Institute, it would not solve the problem. The problem is that the Ukrainian economy is approaching collapse, that the country is a bankrupt.
However, the situation surrounding the Ukrainian crisis affects not only the country itself, but Russia as well. According to Yevgeny Fyodorov, a member of the State Duma committee for the budget and taxes, the Ukrainian events could cause political and economic reforms in Russia.
"The US connects Russia to the events in Ukraine. Their goal is not Ukraine but Russia, their goal is to make the dollar stronger and end the economic crisis through putting pressure on its European allies and so on. These are not tasks of a Ukrainian scale. The US wants Ukraine to become a foothold to influence the world order, to influence Russia. Our prognosis is that the sanctions against Russia will last a long time, there will be several stages," Fydorov says.
According to him, the Russian authorities should take the situation seriously. "Russia has to start treating it seriously. Not the way it is treated today - "we are not afraid of these ridiculous sanctions". This word "ridiculous" is constantly heard in Russian media. These are not ridiculous sanctions, this is a long-term policy of the US that is not connected to Ukraine. Ukraine is a pretext and a method. We need to get away from politics," the lawmaker says.
"There are laws on the international financial system approved in the first reading, the law on accounting. Both introduce additional controlling bodies - one in New York, the other in Delaware - for international accounting. Clearly, this is an additional system of external government. It is necessary to go away from the 20-year policy towards sovereignization. It is necessary to reduce interest rates to the European level at least. It is no accident that the countries with the highest level of sovereignty do not have international reserves, because they are unnecessary in the contemporary construction of sovereignty or play a completely different role than in Russia. We believe that the Ukrainian events will cause significant political reforms in Russia aimed at strengthening or restoring sovereignty, including in the economic direction," he says.
