KIEV, September 19. /ITAR-TASS/. Western sanctions on Russia have not proven to be as effective as expected, participants in a Ukrainian roundtable meeting on sanctions against Russia said on Friday.
According to Yaroslav Zhalilo, deputy director of the National Institute of Strategic Research, Russia has not been very sensitive to the economic sanctions imposed on it.
“The world reaction has come in several rounds of economic sanctions (on Russia). It can be said that this reaction reflects the world’s ongoing belief in the strong impact of economic pressure and the indestructibility of the economic order that was established in the previous decades,” Zhalilo told the meeting titled “Economic Sanctions on Russia: Effectiveness and Efficiency”.
Oleksandr Sharov, the head of the foreign policy department of the National Institute of Strategic Research, said that international sanctions had always had little effect. “The analysis of application of international sanctions show that only one third of such measures reach the assigned goal,” Sharov said.
Other experts also expressed an opinion that the US sanctions on Russia were designed to expel Russian capital from the United States.
“The sanctions which the United States is using against Russia are aimed at getting rid of Russian national capitals which have swamped the United States and are producing a great impact on the behavior of the US financial sector,” Natalya Tatarenko, a representative of the diplomatic academy of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said.
She said that sanctions would be more painful for Ukraine than for Russia. “The terms of Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union are nothing but sanctions against Ukraine. They are telling us that our economy is outdated and that we have close ties with Russia because we did not find time to review our economic structure in the context of national interests,” Tatarenko explained.