West has no right to compensation for sanctions – Russia
The European Union has “neither moral nor legal right” to claim compensation for losses caused by Russia’s counter sanctions, Moscow claims.
The West should first compensate Russia for its policy of economic sanctions before filing lawsuits looking for financial hand outs from Moscow, top Senator Sergey Tsekov said on Sunday.
The EU earlier filed a request to the World Trade Organization (WTO) asking it to appoint a panel of arbitrators to examine the Russian policy, which had been adopted as a response to unilateral embargoes against the country over the Ukraine conflict in 2014. The EU said that in 2019 “the value of published tenders by Russian state-owned enterprises amounted to 23.5 trillion roubles, or approximately EUR 290 billion, which was equivalent to around 20% of Russia's GDP.”
The WTO has reportedly satisfied the request and will appoint a panel of experts to deal with the EU complaint. Senator Tsekov, who is a member of the upper house’s foreign affairs committee, has condemned the EU action and even voiced a counteroffer.
“The EU does not have neither moral nor legal right to seek damages from Russia. As, within the framework of the sanctions policy, they decided not to supply us with goods, we have all the rights to produce them by ourselves,” Tsekov told RIA Novosti.
He also suggested that before claiming damages from Moscow, the West should pay Russia “about a trillion dollars for the losses we have suffered because of the sanctions.”
Summing up the grounds for its request to the WTO, the EU said that it had asked Russia “to remove the measures or to bring them into compliance with WTO rules” many times, both bilaterally as well as via the WTO, but without any significant results.
EU complaints were followed by a report from the Office of the US Trade Representative, which also blamed Russia for its “continued departure from the guiding principles” of the WTO.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responded to these claims by branding them “groundless.”
