US ‘cannibalizing Europe’ – Putin aide
The US insistence on sanctioning Russia has caused a downturn in the EU economy, according to President Vladimir Putin's top economic adviser, Maksim Oreshkin.
In an interview with Expert magazine published on Tuesday, Oreshkin said the sanctions imposed since February last year have caused the EU to lose both its energy security and a key export market.
Oreshkin pointed to the key factors underlying the EU's economic prosperity, outlined by the bloc's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. They include easy availability of energy resources from Russia, the use of cheap production in China, and access to the Russian and Chinese markets.
“The gradual loss of these factors is leading the EU economy towards long-term stagnation,” Oreshkin argued, “because European manufacturers now have neither the export market nor the advantages in technology that they had five to ten years ago.”
Oreshkin accused the US of “cannibalizing its European partners, killing European chemicals, automotive and other industries.” This comes amid a broader degradation of the West and its economic model, he said.
“The economies of the Global North – the US, Japan, the EU – are slowly losing their status, their significance. This gradual decay of the countries of the Global North and the growth of countries in the East and South is what will further shape the landscape of the global economy,” he predicted. Oreshkin noted that China has already become the leading global economic power, while Russia is now the largest economy in Europe, “on course to replace Japan as the world’s fourth largest.”
According to the presidential aide, the world’s key economic players will be focusing their development strategies on growing markets in Asia and Africa in the coming years. Russia’s development will take the same direction, he predicted, especially in the energy sphere.
“The stronger the economic growth [in Asia and Africa], the higher will their level of energy consumption be, and the better the energy markets will feel… For Russia, the key task is to remain the most efficient producers of what we make, which includes energy. We must have lower costs, more efficient production, and then the changes that will occur in the energy markets will affect us to a lesser extent.”
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