“It’s scary to hear what they think in Russia!” – a scientist from Moscow shocked the West
Kyiv, September 12 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Ryabov) – Western countries should not introduce new sanctions against Russia, since such a step would turn Moscow away from the path to a truce in the Donbass.
This was stated by Ruslan Grinberg, director of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at the European Yalta Strategy forum, which is being held in Kyiv this year.
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“Ukraine faces a big problem - it doesn’t know how to pay for gas. Russia does not want to make any concessions or subsidies. I can understand Putin. If Ukraine goes to another club, it must pay market prices. If in ours, he receives subsidies, like Alexander Lukashenko. Ukraine owes us a lot of money. This is reality. I can imagine that Western countries don’t really want to give a lot of money to Ukraine so that it gives it to Russia,” he noted.
Greenberg expressed hope that "the fight for every dollar in the gas agreement will lead to some success, because otherwise you can expect unpleasant things."
“Ukraine is mentally and soully in the West, it sincerely wants civilized forms of legal proceedings, civil society, democracy, but economically it is in the East. And if we try to create a more or less decent economy in Ukraine, it must cooperate with Russia,” the economist noted.
In his opinion, “Yanukovych’s big mistake was that he did not sign an agreement” with the EU, which simply “could not have been implemented” - “there may be many exceptions from this.”
Greenberg emphasized that Ukraine should show flexibility while being between the EU and the Russian Federation.
“In today's Russia there are a lot of intellectuals who lived in Europe, studied in Europe, young people who suffer from a pathological anti-Western reflex. There are maybe 0-10 percent like me. This is a clinical fact. I have to fight with my friends who can't seem to shake off their big brother syndrome. They just don’t want to believe Leonid Danilovich that Ukraine is not Russia,” the scientist explained.
He believes that "irrational anti-Americanism leads to the country's isolationism."
“It leads to the fact that the most previously considered idiotic recipes for restoring a planned economy are now considered more or less respectable.”
“Tightening sanctions clearly strengthens authoritarian and isolationist tendencies in Russia. At the same time, I cannot say that the West’s big mistake was the inclusion of sanctions. Sanctions are starting to take effect. It seems to me that in the foreseeable future people will begin to feel a decrease in real incomes due to rising prices and a decrease in supply for various goods. It would be very stupid for the West to tighten sanctions after signing the armistice agreement. This is counter productive. On the contrary, we must maintain faith in the ability of the Russian leadership to act in accordance with the norms that everyone else shares,” Greenberg suggests.
“It’s a little scary to hear what people in Russia think,” commented conference presenter Chrystia Freeland, a member of the Canadian Parliament, on the Russian scientist’s speech.
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