Putin says Russia, Ukraine natural, complementary econ partners

MOSCOW, Jul 12 (PRIME) -- Russia and Ukraine are natural economic partners that complement each other, and these connections can strengthen competitive advantages, President Vladimir Putin said in his article published on Monday on the Kremlin’s website under the title “On historic unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

“We are natural, mutually complementary economic partners. These close ties are able to strengthen competitive advantages and improve the potential of both countries,” he said.

In 1991–2013, Ukraine saved more than U.S. $82 billion due to low prices for Russian natural gas.

“Kiev is using its own ‘political mathematics’, but in 1991–2013, Ukraine saved more than $82 billion for its budget thanks to the low prices for gas alone, while today it is literally ‘clinging’ to $1.5 billion of Russian payments for the transit of our gas to Europe. If the economic ties remained between our countries, the positive impact for Ukraine could have reached tens of billions of U.S. dollars,” he said.

Ukraine has wasted achievements of many generations of Ukrainians, and industrial and technological giants, the pride of Ukraine in the past, are lying flat, and output of the country’s machine industry shrank by 42% over the past 10 years. The scale of de-industrialization and degradation of the economy is obvious as the power production in Ukraine almost halved over the past 30 years.

The International Monetary Fund puts Ukraine’s gross domestic product per capita at less than $4,000 in 2019, lower than in Albania, Moldova, and Kosovo. “Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe now,” Putin said.

Occasionally, the West issues financial assistance for Ukraine, but the West does it at its own conditions and at its own interest rates, demands preferences and exemptions for Western companies. It also looks like that not only the current generation of Ukrainians, but their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will have to repa the loans.

Speaking about the rhetoric of calling Russia an “aggressor state”, he said Russia was still one of the top three Ukrainian economic partners, and that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were still coming to Russia to make money, and feel cordiality and support here.

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