Putin: EU sanctions are ‘theater of the absurd’

By Laurens Cerulus

The Russian president says the country’s economy is ‘stabilizing.’

The EU’s sanctions on Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis are “absurd,” President Vladimir Putin said in a German newspaper interview, in which he blamed the eastward expansion of NATO for replacing the Berlin Wall with “invisible walls” between Russia and Europe.
“What the European Union is doing with those sanctions is nothing but a theater of the absurd,” the Russian leader told Bild in the interview published Monday, referring to the economic restrictions imposed in 2014 after the Kremlin annexed Crimea and backed a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

“The West’s sanctions are not aimed at helping Ukraine, but at geopolitically pushing Russia back,” he said. “They are foolish and are merely harming both sides.”
He said that, “without exception,” the Ukrainian government in Kiev is to blame for the failure to implement fully last year’s Minsk ceasefire agreement, in particular the promised constitutional changes to give autonomy to eastern Ukraine by the end of 2015. “This has not happened, and the year is over,” Putin said. “That’s not Russia’s fault.”
Asked about the damage of Western sanctions on the Russian economy, Putin acknowledged that “the sanctions are severely harming Russia. But the biggest harm is currently caused by the decline of the prices for energy.”
He said there was a “positive side” to the drop in oil and gas revenues: “If you earn so many petrodollars — as we once did — that you can buy anything abroad, this slows down developments in your own country.”

“When I learned that [Merkel] does not like dogs, I apologized, of course.”

The economy is “gradually stabilizing,” he said, saying that while GDP fell 3.8 percent last year and inflation clocked in at 12.7 percent, Russia ran a trade surplus. “For the first time in many years, we are exporting significantly more goods with a high added value, and we have more than $300 billion in gold reserves. Several programs for modernizing the economy are being carried out,” he said.


The Russian president wouldn’t say anything he admired about German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but said, “I trust her, she is a very open person.”
When Merkel visited Putin in Sochi in 2007, the Russian president brought his black Labrador Koni to the meeting, making the German chancellor, who is widely known to fear dogs, visibly uncomfortable. Asked whether he did that on purpose to put her ill at ease because he knew she was scared of dogs, Putin said: “No, I did not know that. I wanted to make her happy. When I learned that she does not like dogs, I apologized, of course.”
In his first half decade in power, after taking office in 2000, Putin sought close relations with the West. He turned more hostile to America in the last years of the Bush presidency, and then harder against the West after reclaiming the presidency of Russia in 2012 and launching a domestic crackdown on opponents.
“I’m still the same,” Putin said.
The two waves of NATO enlargement — in 1999 and then in 2004 — that saw much of the former Warsaw Pact join the alliance broke a promise made by Western leaders to the Soviets in the closing days of the Cold War and “led to mutual misunderstandings and assignments of guilt,” Putin said. “They are the cause of all crises ever since.”
“Of course every state has the right to organize its security the way it deems appropriate,” the Russian leader added, referring to the NATO members in Eastern Europe. “But the states that were already in NATO, the member states, could also have followed their own interests — and abstained from an expansion to the east.”