Damage From Russia’s Food Embargo To The Kiev Regime Will Amount To $ 600 Million A Year

Ukraine’s dairy and confectionary industries will be the hardest hit by Russian food embargo, while its machinery producing sector will be fully destroyed, the president of the Ukrainian Analytical Center, economist Alexander Okhrimenko, said on Thursday.

“We have nothing that could substitute this (Russian) market,” he said. “We are selling dairy products only to countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (a loose alliance of post-Soviet republics),” Okhrimenko said.

“The Russian market was very important for us, we will have to shut down some enterprises of food industry,” he told the Ukrainian daily Segodnya.

According to analysts, the damage from food embargo for Kiev will amount in the future to about $600 million a year. Apart from declining amounts of production in food industry, the machinery producing sector will practically disappear as such.

“Machine industry will be the hardest hit, as it was oriented towards the Russian market and its products cannot be sold anywhere else,” the former economics minister of Ukraine, Viktor Suslov, said.

Meanwhile, the European Union is buying only corn and vegetable oil from Ukraine, and exports of articles made from straw and cotton wool are growing.

The Russian government has decided to impose food embargo against Ukraine starting from January 1, Russia’s Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulyukayev said on Wednesday.

“Since Ukraine joined anti-Russian sanctions — economic, financial — we’ve decided to impose … protective measures in the form of food embargo,” he said, adding that the decision was “postponed till January 1.”

Earlier Ulyukayev said that in case it was imposed, the food embargo against Ukraine would be similar to that applied to the EU countries.

In mid-August of 2015 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that in case Kiev accepted the economic part of the agreement on its association with the European Union supplies of agricultural products from the country to Russia would be banned. Back then Medvedev noted that Moscow gave time to Kiev to solve issues related to economic regulation till January 1, 2016.