Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk speaks during a cabinet meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 18, 2015, Yatsenyuk said on Friday that his country won’t repay a $3 billion debt owed to Russian Federation by this weekend after Moscow’s refusal to accept repayment terms already offered to other worldwide creditors.
Advertisement
The moratorium means that Ukraine is likely to default on the debt, which is due on Sunday.
Storchak said Ukraine had no chance of winning in court. Kiev has a 10-day grace period to pay debt to Moscow after the late December deadline.
“We never said there weren’t people (in Ukraine) who work on resolving various issues there, including in the military sphere”, Putin said when a Ukrainian journalist brought up the question of two captured Russians now on trial in Kiev.
“We are ready to look at them”, he said.
“We have stated again and again that Russian Federation is present with military personnel in eastern Ukraine and that is based on our own intelligence sources”, Stoltenberg said as he met Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at North Atlantic Treaty Organisation headquarters in Brussels.
Ukraine’s economy has struggled over the past few years and the country has negotiated repayment terms with creditors, but not with Russian Federation.
The bond was acquired by and is held by Russia’s National Wealth Fund, an agency acting on behalf of the Russian government, according to a staff paper considered by the board.
Kiev also sought to give a political dimension to the debt, hinting that Russian Federation bought Ukrainian bonds in December 2013 in an act of clandestine bribery of then President Viktor Yanukovych who was facing massive anti-government protests at the time. That deal involves a 20 percent write-down of bond holdings, which cut Ukraine’s sovereign debt from $19 billion to $15.5 billion.
Advertisement
In November, Putin proposed a three-year debt restructuring program provided that loan guarantees were in place from the United States, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
