“Today, the European Union is not only our closest ally in confronting Russian aggression. I want to thank the EU for being our largest trading partner,” President Poroshenko said during his participation in the youth forum: “The opinion of the youth is important. Prospects for joining NATO and the EU” in Kyiv region.
The President noted that according to Head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine Hugues Mingarelli, in 2013, the EU share in Ukraine’s foreign trade had amounted to 25%. Petro Poroshenko stressed that already in 2018 the share of the European Union was already 42.6%. At the same time, Russia’s share in exports amounted to 33%, and now it is 7.7%.
“How did it happen? It is very simple: the Russian Federation considers economic relations an element of the hybrid war and began to apply it not in 2014, but in 2011-2012, when nothing seemed to motivate them to do so,” the Head of State emphasized.
Petro Poroshenko reminded that Russia had blocked access to its markets without any explanation for producers of dairy products, cheese, sugar, pipes, products of mechanical engineering and metallurgy. “This was an instrument of pressure,” he said, adding that in 2014, they had simply imposed an embargo not only on the export of Ukrainian goods to Russia, but also on our transit to other countries – China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. “This was done to put Ukraine on its knees. So that a large number of Ukrainians who will lose jobs at industrial enterprises can become a powerful resource for internal explosion and be used to destabilize the situation in the state. To split, tear the state apart,” he added.
At the same time, the President stressed: “Cooperation with the European Union did not allow that. We have substantially reduced the negative consequences of the Russian embargo. We have entered new markets. The most powerful, most liberal, most reliable market in the world is the European Union market. And nobody will either shut off gas or impose an embargo there”.
