MOSCOW, 4 March. /TASS/. Politicians alleging that Russia is isolated seem to have problems with geography, Russian State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin said on Wednesday.
"It is simply impossible to isolate the Russian economy, as producers of this crisis of mistrust are saying now and then, bravely stating that they have ‘isolated Russia’," the speaker of the Russian lower house told Rossiya 24 television.
"They seem to have problems with geography, and they think the world is the US and a group of satellite states, although it is far from it," he said, noting that alone the BRICS group of nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) accounts for 42% of the global population and 27% of the global economy.
Earlier, US President Barack Obama said Russia was isolated, and its economy was in dire state.
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.