MOSCOW, April 10. /TASS/. Sanctions against Russia would have cost Serbia 15 billion euro ($16.47 billion), putting the country on the brink of collapse, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin told TASS.
"If we had followed the European Union’s unwise and hysterical policy toward Russia, Serbia would have lost at least 15 billion euro and no one in the EU would even think of compensating for this," he said.
He stressed that Serbia "is not ready to finance the war in Ukraine." "The fact that our sanctions against Russia would not do even minimal damage to Russia, but would destroy us is of little concern for the EU, which continues to insists that we do that," he noted.
Sanctions against Vulin
A source told RASS earlier that the European Union is starting the process of imposing sanctions on Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin following his speech in the European Parliament on Wednesday, where he commented on relations with Brussels and Moscow. Brussels also demanded that President Aleksandar Vucic remove him from the country’s new government.
Earlier on Wednesday, Vulin told the European Parliament that Serbia will never go to war with Russia in exchange for EU membership. He said that Serbia for 20 years has been fulfilling "every wish and demand" of the EU but was told that the bloc will admit Ukraine and Moldova as next members, even though they haven’t yet met a single condition to join.
He also rejected a chance of Serbia imposing sanctions on Russia. Serbia will not "do anything so low as imposing sanctions on Russia because of a conflict that could have been avoided if you had just respected the Minsk Agreements."
He also told TASS that Brussels had devised a plan to overthrow Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic with the support of Western intelligence services.