BEIJING, September 23. / ITAR-TASS/. China will never support or join recently imposed sanctions against Russia, Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the Russian parliament’s upper chamber, said on Tuesday following her talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The speaker of the Federation Council quoted the Chinese president as saying, that China will never support sanctions against Russia, no matter how much pressure is exerted on them.

According to Matviyenko, China publicly stated its opinion on the inadmissibility of unilateral sanctions, their illegitimacy and counter-productivity.

“This is where our positions absolutely coincide,” she said adding that both Russia and China consider such sanctions as “ineffective and view them as attempts to exert pressure on sovereign states in order to weaken them and change their positions, to restrain their development.”

“This is China’s public position and we are grateful to China for such evaluations,” Matviyenko, who is currently on an official visit to China, said.

She added that no sanctions would influence partnership relations of Russia and China saying that “the Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation is aimed at the long-term perspective and it is susceptible neither to any form of a political environment nor to anyone’s ambitions since it is in the fundamental interests of our peoples.”

 

Western sanctions against Russia

Last week the European Union and the United States introduced a new set of sanctions targeting Russian officials and companies.

The so-called “black list” of EU sanctions published by the organization’s Official Journal on Friday included major Russian energy and defense companies as well as officials from Russia and Ukraine.

The West started to impose sanctions on Russia in March 2014 over the events in Ukraine. First, an early EU summit stalled the talks on a visa-free regime and a new base agreement on Russia-EU cooperation. Further on the sanctions were grouped into three categories - personal, corporate and sectoral.

By the beginning of September some 420 Russian individuals and 143 companies had been put on the sanction lists of the European Union, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland and Norway.

In response to Western sanctions, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on August 6 to ban for one year the imports of agricultural, raw and food products from the countries, which imposed sanctions against Russia.

Prime Minister Medvedev announced on August 7 that the Russian government imposed 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.