SOCHI, September 19 /ITAR-TASS/. Russia is preparing a lawsuit to the WTO to argue Western sanctions, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an exclusive interview with ITAR-TASS on Friday.

 “We are planning to file a lawsuit. The documents that are currently in the making will be handed over to the so-called WTO jurisdiction body in order to contest the actions of our partners, including those that are exerting pressure on our economy and are aimed at suffocating some of our companies. We are also going to appeal against the so-called sectoral sanctions,” the Russian prime minister said.

WTO’s decision on Russia’s appeal will show whether the World Trade Organization is engaged by the West, Dmitry Medvedev added.

“Decisions that will follow will signal how unbiased the WTO remains in making its decisions,” he said.

At a meeting of the State Council on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he believed Western countries that adopted sanctions against Russia in fact defied the principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

“The sanctions imposed on Russia are nothing but a departure from the basic WTO principles by some of our partners,” Putin said. “They violate the principle of all countries’ equal access to the markets of goods and services. They ignore the most favored nation status in trade and the principle of fair and free competition.”

“All this is being done in a politicized way, without any observance of WTO rules,” he said. “In fact, a group of Western countries has unilaterally taken the liberty of ‘deleting’ these and some other WTO principles for Russia, which is on the list of the world’s six largest economies," the president noted.

September 12, Russian Minister for Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev claimed the latest US and EU sanctions against Russia run counter the norms of the World Trade Organization (WTO) like the previous ones.

“Yes, I think that the previous package was a ground to apply to the World Trade Organization and we shall do it,” he told journalists. “But we shall do it without haste, we shall provide maximum reason and arguments in our request,” the minister said.