Medvedev Claims U.S. Will Never Lift Sanctions on Russia

Washington will never remove sanctions on Moscow because this is what its policies have been based on for years, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said while answering questions from users of the VKontakte social network on Friday, Russia Business Today reported.

“I can tell you frankly: they will never remove sanctions on Russia because their policies – at least in the past 100 years – have been based on the continuous use of sanctions against our country, no matter what it is called, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. There hasn’t been a single historical period when there were no sanctions at all,” Medvedev said, according to Russian media.

The Russian prime minister said that Washington’s position was regrettable “because it undermines international cooperation to a certain extent and prevents us from working together with the U.S. to resolve key issues concerning global security and economic development.”

Answering another question, Medvedev said the new Russian internet law aiming at isolating the country from the World Wide Web would not be as strict as China’s.

“Of course, we will not have such regulation as in China. I will even say more — even in China this regulation often does not bring, perhaps, the results to which it was originally oriented. Moreover, we do not strive for such regulation, no firewall appears here,” Medvedev said.

The Russian prime minister went on saying that Russia should protect itself against the risk of being disconnected from the global Internet, emphasizing that the recently introduced bill that would establish a “sovereign” Internet was aimed at making the Russian Internet sustainable.

“We need to protect our interests, not so that we don’t disconnect something, but so that we are not disconnected. That is also possible. After all, the Internet is not just a stream of news, it is a huge number of technologies, it is an industrial Internet, a medical Internet. And what if at some point we find ourselves being cut off from another world?” Medvedev said.