Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Goa, India this weekend at the annual BRICS summit, where the big announcement was that Igor Sechin’s Rosneft had bought a controlling stake (49 percent) in the Indian Essar Oil company. At a press conference for the announcement yesterday, Putin was asked if Russia would consider softening its counter-sanctions against the United States and the European Union. “Screw them,” he said. More:
“We deliberately enacted restrictions on importing agricultural products, a kind of an asymmetric response. They hit our manufacturing, dual-purpose manufacturing, financial restrictions… but we can’t do the same in response. I mean, we could, but it would have been senseless. So we acted in the sphere where it creates problems for them – their losses are in the billions, you see yourself. We are not keeping count, it’s being tallied by Western European experts, representatives from relevant industries. That’s why we did it, we profited from it. We won’t be doing anything to just punish somebody, and punish ourselves.”
