Mutual sanctions imposed by Western countries and Russia will be destructive for global development and economic growth, said Kazakhstani Foreign Minister Yerlan Idrisov at the UN General Assembly. He reminded that the countries imposing sanctions over the situation in Ukraine control 60% of the world's GDP. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that Russia will not accept U.S. conditions and will only cooperate based on equality and mutual respect of interests.Moscow hopes that the import-displacement policy recently declared will succeed, though it admits that realization of the initiative would be complicated. It will require state support, high volume of resources and solution of administrative problems.
"The issue of import displacement is old, we have been telling the very same story for a quarter of a century. Even during Perestroika, we noticed the start of the primitivization of the Russian economic structure. And today, we are back at the bottom of the ladder," says Ruslan Grinberg, the director of the RAS Institute of Economy.According to Grinberg, the biggest mistake was to start import displacement of all products: "It seems like an illusion to me. No matter how horrible the geopolitical situation is, it gives us chances, it should clearly reflect priorities. Development of import displacement priorities - what we should displace and what we should leave - is the main goal.
LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky is very optimistic about import displacement and international commerce: "Former parts of the USSR, the South Caucasus and Central Asia will give us all we take from the West, from faraway Latin America. There is no need to export anything. No need to import. We import the bad from abroad, we opened our gates to trash. There is no need to bring us anything and buy anything from us! Then, no sanctions would help. That is how it is, because we are fully self-sufficient.
"Mikhail Delyagin, the director of the Institute for Globalization Problems, has a contrary opinion: "Our economy is not efficient enough. It is suffering from corruption, monopolism. In 2012, joining the WTO happened under slave conditions. Consequently, the economy cannot develop properly, because the conditions block development themselves, the country, at least the government of Medvedev, is not going to do its job. As a result, to prevent economic collapse, it has to go for devaluation. Because there is no other way to support an economy in extreme corruption, monopolism, lack of state development policy.
"Constantine Sivkov, vice president of the Academy for Geopolitical Studies, is confident that realization of the import-displacement policy needs an understanding that the current economic model is not independent, it is hostile to the country and needs replacing. "In current conditions, when we need to grow a huge amount of produce in short time, only the mobilizational economic model should be implemented," the analyst believes."Secondly, we need to give up the concept of integrating into the world order. The world division of labour according to the globalization model was proposed by the West. A new, quality model of global, world order should be built, maintaining adequate trade turnover between the participants in the processes on the one hand, and balanced development of every one of them on the other," says Sivkov.
Yuri Krupnov, the chairman of the Monitoring Council of the Institute for Demography, Migration and Regional Development, told Vestnik Kavkaza that "Russia has seriously lost markets of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, especially food markets, in the past 25 years. Now, it needs political decisions that we are moving from full dependence on the global food market and starting to make contract systems with Azerbaijan, Armenia, Central Asian states, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. Moreover, we need to form a system of processing products, including use of advanced methods, for example, cryodesiccation, super-fast freezing. It is a colossal program that will not only assure import displacement but practical construction of the Eurasian Union as well. That will be practical cooperation in the system of Eurasian integration."
