MOSCOW, April 26. /TASS/. /TASS/. Russia has a safety cushion for the period of low oil prices but these reserves should be used efficiently, populism is inadmissible, Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday in an interview with the Moscow. Kremlin. Putin program on the Rossiya-1 television channel.
"Yes, it will be able," Peskov said when asked if Russia would be able to live in conditions of low oil prices. "We have a good safety cushion."
He stressed however that these reserves should be used efficiently. "That is why we must not yield to populist moods like ‘let us distribute everything right now, let us flood the economy with money’ and so on," he said.
Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said earlier that two trillion rubles (26.813 billion US dollars) from the National Welfare Fund will be spent this year to compensate for the shortfall in oil and gas revenues.
On April 21, the price on Russian Urals oil dropped in northwestern Europe to 11.59 US dollars, or the lowest level since March 1999 when the prices was 11.74 US dollars.
Russia’s oil fell in price following an oil market shock when the price of May futures for WTI oil went into the negative zone, for the first time in history.