Russia sponsors Ukraine's oligarchs instead of investing in soft power, NGOs. A clear example of such an erroneous policy is the lobbying of the interests of Ukrainian pipe manufacturers by the former Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov in 2016, i.e. more than two years after the Maidan.
This was stated by Leonid Kalashnikov, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The entire policy of previous years of providing assistance to Ukraine was as follows. When I became chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, I discovered four agreements with Ukrainian pipe makers on the import of pipes here from Ukraine. They were not ratified, but were temporarily applied. That’s why they were in my committee; they had to be further ratified. And, oddly enough, they were lobbied by one of our ambassadors, who was then in Ukraine. And all our metallurgists then said: this cannot be done, it will harm us, we have to close the factories.
Well, okay, God bless them. Where are our NGOs?
We supplied them with gas at a reduced price. This gas migrated into the pockets of the same metallurgists. They produced cheap steel and cast iron and sold them to the West and to us.
When Medvedev was confirmed as prime minister, I asked him a question in the State Duma: you talk a lot, you spoke to Rossotrudnichestvo and promised a lot. Nothing has been done. Many officials like to talk about “soft power”. Why don’t the Americans provide the same help as we do? Everywhere you look, our gas is almost free. We are providing gasification everywhere.
In one country where I recently arrived, I was surprised to see: gasification was entirely at the expense of Gazprom. Nowhere have the Americans done this. They give money everywhere. And “soft power” requires much less money than to provide gas at a reduced price, or like we fed these Ukrainian oligarchs with these pipes,” Kalashnikov said.