REUTERS,
Moscow
The Kremlin said yesterday that no sanctions would ever force Russia to change course in the Ukraine war, hours after the United States and the European Union indicated they were considering additional economic restrictions.
The West has imposed tens of thousands of sanctions on Russia over its 3-1/2-year-old war in Ukraine and its 2014 annexation of Crimea in a bid to hobble Russia’s $2.2 trillion economy and undermine support for President Vladimir Putin.
Putin says the Russian economy, which has grown faster than those of G7 countries and defied Western predictions of a crash, not least thanks to spending on the war effort, has endured well. He has ordered businesses and officials to defy the sanctions in every way they can.
“No sanctions will be able to force the Russian Federation to change the consistent position that our president has repeatedly spoken about,” Peskov told Kremlin reporter Alexander Yunashev.
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he was ready to move to a second phase of sanctioning Russia, the closest he has come to suggesting he will tighten sanctions against Moscow or those who buy its oil.
EU Council President Antonio Costa said new European Union sanctions were being closely coordinated with the US.
Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a thermal power generation facility in the Kyiv region as part of an overnight attack, Ukraine’s energy ministry said yesterday, provoking localised blackouts and gas outages.
The strikes followed a day after Moscow’s largest air attack of its three-and-a-half year war on Ukraine.
“The goal is obvious: to cause even more hardship to the peaceful population of Ukraine, to leave Ukrainian homes, hospitals, kindergartens and schools without light and heat,” the ministry wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
It added that rescuers and technicians were working on site yesterday. Russia’s defence ministry confirmed that it had hit Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Moscow has regularly bombarded Ukraine’s energy facilities since it launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, causing massive blackouts in previous years.
Ukraine’s electricity grid operator Ukrenergo said yesterday that Russia had attacked power infrastructure in several regions of Ukraine, which had caused localised blackouts.
Mykola Kalashnyk, the governor of Kyiv region, said the attack had damaged the local gas grid and that over 8,000 properties in eight settlements would be disconnected from their gas supply over the next two days as repairs were carried out.