Roundup: Russia to extend anti-sanction measures for one year

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced here that Russia would extend anti-sanction measures against Western countries for one more year.

"We are prolonging our response measures by one year, beginning from today (Wednesday)," Putin said at a government meeting held in the day. "The prime minister (Dmitry Medvedev) wrote a letter to me asking to prolong the countermeasures we took to the anti- Russian sanctions imposed by some countries."

Putin signed a decree Wednesday prolonging "some special economic measures to ensure Russia's security," said the Kremlin in an online statement.

The European Union announced Monday that it has decided to extend economic sanctions against Russia to Jan. 31, 2016, to ensure Moscow's full implementation of the Minsk agreement reached in February on the Ukraine crisis. The restrictive measures, introduced in response to Russia's alleged role in the Ukraine crisis, were imposed in July 2014 and reinforced in September of the same year.

Moscow has repeatedly denied the accusations over the Ukraine crisis, stressing that Western sanctions are counterproductive. In August 2014, Moscow imposed a year-long embargo on food imports from Western countries in response to EU and U.S. sanctions.

According to Putin, Russia's countermeasures provide opportunities for domestic agricultural producers to expand business, in line with the general strategy of Russia becoming more economically self-reliant.

While addressing a separate meeting attended by members of the Presidential Council for Science and Education earlier in the day, Putin stressed the importance of improving Russia's competitiveness in scientific research and new technologies to protect the country's "scientific and technological sovereignty" and dismissed the idea that Russia would be isolated from international scientific exchanges, describing it as a "way to backwardness." Endite