A petition to give the food to the poor, which has gained almost 300,000 signatures, claims that sanctions on Western food imports have driven prices up 20%.
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The extended ban will continue until August 2016. “[Foreigners] dump all this crap here while our own Russian products are the best”, he said. Even condoms could make it to the list of restricted imports.
However, Ilya Balakirev, chief analyst at the UFS investment company, disagreed that the food embargo could be described as a success in view of the new decree, saying that the provision “states a physical inability to fully control the importation of the embargoed products”.
The so-called cheese execution is a symbolic severing of ties with Europe, experts said.
Introduction of potential restrictions has already been criticised by some leading Russian IT security analysts.
But smugglers found ways to sneak the delicious contraband across the border despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s August. 6, 2014, decree. “Russians today need this food and in our Slavic tradition the destruction of the bread is considered a very grave sin”, the minister said at a Friday press conference. “There are veterans of (World War II) who remember the blockade” of Leningrad, when hundreds of thousands of people died of hunger, she said. Yesterday, Russia’s state media frantically reported on the bulldozed and incinerated piles of French cheese, German nuts, and American snack foods.
The Russian Investigative Committee, an FBI-like regulation enforcement physique, in June reopened a 1998 chilly case involving the slaying of a Siberian mayor and named Khodorkovsky as a suspect.
The Rosstat statistics agency says the number of Russians living below the poverty line – defined as those earning less than 10,400 roubles ($160) a month – has jumped.
Many Russian citizens are old enough that the starvation that marked the Soviet era is still fresh in their minds. “There are lots of people in our country who could benefit greatly from these goods”.
Kremlin adviser Yevgeny Bobrov described the order as “high-handed” and analysts said it could go down badly in a country where a third of the population still lived in poverty.
Saveleva proposes that instead of destroying the sanctioned foodstuffs, the products could be handed over to the needy or sent to residents in Eastern Ukraine, where thousands have been killed in fighting between government forces and Russia-backed insurgents in the past year.
One Russian wrote on Facebook: “My mother used to smack me if I wasted a piece of bread”.
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One priest from the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoys close ties with the Kremlin, expressed his anger.
