New U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia are damaging to bilateral ties between Moscow and Washington but cannot hurt Russia’s financial system as it is resilient to external pressures, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Saturday, according to RIA Novosti.
On Friday, the White House said that U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed another round of sanctions on Russia over the poisoning of former spy Sergey Skripal in Britain.
“Russia’s economy has already proved to be resilient to external restrictions in recent years,” Siluanov said.
“With regard to the public debt and corporate debt, we are confident that the financial system we have created allows us to meet the needs of the budget and enterprises in borrowed resources,” he added.
The U.S. State Department said in a statement that with the new round of sanctions Washington will oppose the extension of any loan or financial or technical assistance to Russia by international financial institutions.
According to Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, the new measures “show the trumped-up nature of the Skripal investigation.”
“That is another huge and the strongest proof that the story about Skripals was invented, that it is a provocation,” she said. “At least, that part is trumped-up which was presented by the UK, by London, by the Theresa May government as an official version. That is a story that has totally discredited itself,” Zakharova said on Sunday in an interview on TV channel Rossiya 1.
