MOSCOW, March 12. /TASS/. Western sanctions introduced against Russia come in violation of international law and the principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, Sergey Naryshkin said on Thursday.
The sanctions policy is in fact a price the national business has to pay for "foreign policy mistakes and miscalculations of the Western states’ governments," Naryshkin said.
These mistakes and miscalculations include both the dreaming of ones about hegemony and a unipolar world and the inability to resist such dreaming by the others, who forget about national interests of their own business, he explained.
"I believe that the anti-Russian approach is wrong and it is completely illegal and violates the norms of the international law and the norms of the WTO," Naryshkin said.
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The lower house speaker noted that "sanctions have both undermined trust and violated a number of intergovernmental agreements and broken the system of international law as a whole."
"They have already inflicted certain damage on both the business and the citizens of our countries," he added.
The sanctions, which the Western countries have introduced against Russia in order to punish Moscow for its stance on Ukraine, have only bolstered the so-called party of war in Kiev, he said.
Russian officials and companies came under the first batch of Western sanctions, including visa bans and asset freezes, after Russia incorporated Crimea in mid-March 2014 after the February 2014 coup.
The West announced new, sectoral, restrictions against Russia in late July 2014, in particular, for what the West claimed was Moscow’s alleged involvement in protests in Ukraine’s south-east.
In response, Russia imposed on August 6, 2014 a one-year ban on imports of beef, pork, poultry, fish, cheeses, fruit, vegetables and dairy products from Australia, Canada, the European Union, the United States and Norway.
New punitive measures against Russia were imposed in September and then in December, when the European Union banned some investment in Crimea.
