Interfax: Lavrov denies Russia pressed Ukraine to opt against EU deal

BRUSSELS. Dec 17 (Interfax) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has denied that Russia pressed Ukraine to opt against signing a planned association agreement with the European Union.

“We gave an honest warning, we didn’t blackmail anyone: the Commonwealth of Independent States treaty on the free trade zones has the reservation that, when a situation emerges that poses risks to any industry in a member country, that state has a right to terminate its easy terms. It wasn’t a case involving any sanctions,” Lavrov said after a meeting with EU officials in Brussels.

Allegations of Russian pressure on Ukraine “target a philistine,” he said. “One can drum such dead-simple slogans into someone’s head without any explanations. A person who sits in front of a television keeps hearing the same thing, a phrase that is repeated many times, and it gets stuck in their head.”

“It is primarily not geopolitics or ideological considerations but the interests of the Russian economy that all [Russian] trade relations hinge on today,” the minister said.

“We have signed the agreement on free trade with CIS countries, had 18 years of extremely hard negotiations in agreeing the terms of our accession to the World Trade Organization, and have built our defense for a certain period so that our industry, agriculture and service sector can become more competitive thanks to those protective measures, and if we gave it all up now, it would have meant our decision to join the WTO had been worthless,” he said.

“The [EU] free trade agreement with Ukraine would have meant one thing only if we had kept our own free trade zone with Ukraine: Ukraine would have opened up 85% to European goods, those goods would have flooded the Ukrainian market, while Ukrainian goods, being rivaled out by European goods, would have flown abroad massively, and Russia and Belarus would have been the most obvious candidate recipients of those goods, and thereby our own manufacturing of similar products would been killed off,” Lavrov said.

“If we want to follow the lofty statements that were issued at the end of the Cold War, – though stereotypes of that era still exist today, – we will have to admit that security is indivisible, no one must be allowed to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of others, all countries must have equal rights, the sovereignty of any state must be respected,” he said.