Russian Federation to ban Ukraine food imports

Yatseniuk said that Ukraine has nearly shed itself of its 100% dependence on gas supplies from Russian Federation and two years ago the country started reverse gas supplies from the European Union (EU).

His snappish interview aired a day after Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Ukraine should “stop acting out” and pay up, according to comments carried by the RBC news agency.

“There will be many amongst the Western official community who will push Ukraine to accept this deal”, said Timothy Ash, the head of Europe, Middle East and Africa credit strategy at Nomura global, pointing to the “new-found focus” on Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the violence in Paris that killed at least 129 people.

“In the recent meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Managing Director Christine Lagarde, the Russian authorities outlined a proposal for how to relieve the debt and financing situation of Ukraine in the context of the fund supported program”. Since then, Islamist terrorism has taken over the global agenda and provided common objective.

In eastern Ukraine the guns were mostly silent in September and October, but the Ukrainian military reported six soldiers killed over the weekend.

Baltic and central European member states are anxious that the EU executive and west European partners may be preparing to let Moscow off the hook of sanctions over Ukraine in return for cooperation in the Middle East.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said on Thursday the commission chief’s “correlation with fulfilling the Minsk accords, especially in the current conditions when we see Kiev’s unwillingness, once again, to honour these accords” makes his offer “hardly relevant or possible”. We were asked to postpone the payment for the next year in the amount of 3 bln [US dollars – TASS]. I said that we were ready for a deeper restructuring.

“This will need to be reflected in the upcoming review of our sanctions, ” he said.

Private creditors agreed to a 20 percent “haircut” and a four-year maturity extension to cut Ukraine’s debt burden, under a restructuring called for by the global Monetary Fund.