MOSCOW, June 22. /TASS/. Russia’s government will ask the president to extend Moscow’s restrictive measures in response to the EU latest move to prolong sanctions for six months.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered deputy premier Sergey Prikhodko to prepare a request to President Vladimir Putin to extend Russia’s counter-sanctions introduced in August 2014 "for this period."
The government will also prepare a draft government decree listing the goods targeted by sanctions.
"I ask you to prepare my request to the president with a proposal to extend the presidential decree for this period on the introduction of restrictive measures by Russia," he said.
A respective government decree is also due to be prepared on the categories of goods and those subjected to Russia’s restrictive measures, Medvedev told a meeting with his deputy premiers
Prikhodko assured the prime minister that the respective documents will be prepared.
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Sanctions and retaliatory sanctions
Earlier on Monday, the EU Council at the foreign ministers’ level extended the economic sanctions against Russia for six months until January 31, 2016. The decision comes in an effort to implement in full the February 12 Minsk agreements on Ukraine, a spokeswoman for the council’s external affairs service, Susanne Kiefer said.
Russia imposed a package of countermeasures on August 7, 2014 in response to the sanctions introduced by the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union and Norway over Moscow’s stance on developments in neighboring Ukraine.
Russia’s countermeasures involved a one-year ban on the import of vegetables and fruit, dairy and meat products from these countries. Certain kinds of finished products made of meat (except for sausage) and fish were not covered by the ban.
The Russian government softened its food embargo later that month by excluding concentrates of vegetable and animal protein, sports nutrition, lactose-free milk and vitamin-mineral complexes from the list of banned imports. Russia also lifted the ban on the supply of seed potatoes, onion sets, hybrid sugar corn and peas for sowing.