Russian Ambassador to Cairo Georgy Borisenko has downplayed the effect of the new regime of sanctions imposed on his country recently against the background of ongoing Russian military operations in Ukraine.
This is not the first time, he said, the US and its allies impose sanctions on Russia.
“We have already got used to these sanctions, since 2014 when the citizens of the Crimea peninsula refused to live in a country ruled by a Nazi regime and decided to reunite with Russia,” Ambassador Borisenko told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview.
He said what he described as the ‘collective West’ had imposed sanctions on Russia over 100 times in the past decade.
“The restrictions even started to repeat themselves,” the ambassador said,
This unfriendly policy, he said, aims to put pressure on the Russian economy.
“However, the same policy has encouraged Russia to develop its own industry and now it is much stronger than it was ten years ago,” Ambassador Borisenko said.
He said his country has been using different countermeasures for a decade now to minimise the negative impacts of Western sanctions.
He added that Russia also relies on its strategic partners around the world and looks forward to their support.
“I am sure the Western sanctions against us will only promote Russian-Egyptian relations and will boost trade between the two countries,” he said.
He unveiled Russian plans to reduce dependence on the US currency in trade deals with other countries.
The US currency, he said, has become a political tool more than ever.
Ambassador Borisenko expected American policies to put the global market on the edge of a new economic crisis.
Russia, he said, would not be the only country that would suffer from the negative consequences of these policies.
He said by excluding his country from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, widely known as SWIFT, western countries were ‘biting the hands that feed them’ under pressure from the US.
“There is no real alternative to the Russian natural resources delivered to the European market,” Ambassador Borisenko said.
He added this market would be cut off, if Russian expenses are not covered.
He said western media outlets had conceded that excluding Russia from SWIFT would have a huge negative impact on European economies.
“Europe will pay a great economic price for this,” the ambassador said.
He noted that the value of Russia’s trade with Germany reached $57 billion last year.
He revealed that Russia has its own system for the transfer of banking messages.
The same system, he said, is also used by several other countries.
“The system will hopefully include more members soon,” the ambassador said.
He added Europe stands to lose the most from Germany’s halting of the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline project.
Europe, he said, has been experiencing one of the most serious energy crises in years.
Ambassador Borisenko cited comments by specialists who say it is practically impossible to replace Russian gas as a main source of energy for Europe.
Europeans, he said, fully understand, describing Nord Stream 2 as a mutual project between Russia and Europe.
He added that European states topped by Germany would have benefited from this ambitious project.
The project, the ambassador noted, was due to solve all energy problems in Europe which tries to get rid of energy sources with high carbon footprint.
He said Nord Stream 2 was politicised from the beginning because of continuous pressure from the US.
“It is politicised right now,” he said. “The reality, however, is that you cannot politicise weather conditions, the objective needs of people for heating or the needs of industry for fuel.”
The Russian diplomat said the goal of ongoing Russian military operations in Ukraine is to demilitarise it.
“The operations also aim to denazify Ukraine,” he said. “This country should not be ruled by neo-Nazis who kill Russians, as was the case since 2014.”
He said Ukraine should stop endangering Russian security, using NATO troops and armaments deployed on its territory.
He said Russia expects Ukraine to be a friendly state, for instance, with a neutral status.
Moscow, he added, does not want this country to be subordinated to Washington, which used it during past 30 years against Russia.
He described fears from ecological threats from the ongoing Russian operations in Ukraine as ‘nonsensical’.
He said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on February 19 this year his intention to withdraw from the Budapest Memorandum – the only treaty that restricts the development, spread and use of nuclear weapons.
He said Ukraine would be opening the door for an ecological catastrophe if it possesses an atomic bomb.
The ambassador added that Ukraine can easily develop a ‘dirty bomb’, utilising used nuclear fuel from four of its power plants.
These power plants, he said, are maintained by US companies.
“This fuel is stored in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, surrounding the power plant, which is not yet fully deactivated after the 1986 incident,” Ambassador Borisenko said.
He added that this was why Russian troops had taken control of this zone, shortly after the beginning of the special operations in Ukraine.
The ambassador noted that the Chernobyl area is now guarded by the Russian army and Ukrainian soldiers who were deployed there before the operations.
Ambassador Borisenko accused the US and NATO of using Ukraine as a tool to put pressure on Russia and threaten it by deploying weapons in it.
He added that the US and NATO also did the same by convincing Ukraine to include an article in its constitution on joining NATO as a goal.
He said the US had provided Ukraine with military assistance to the tune of $2.5 billion in the past seven years only.
It also shipped, he said, thousand of tonnes of lethal weapons to the country.
“This is a matter of national security for Russia,” Ambassador Borisenko said. “NATO’s ballistic missiles deployed on the Ukrainian territory close to our border can reach Moscow in less than 5 minutes.”
He said Russia needs written guaranties for safety from the West.
“Otherwise, Russia will have to respond by military-technical means on aggressive steps by Washington and its satellites,” the Russian ambassador concluded.
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