China and other growing economies are catching up with the US, Dmitry Peskov says
People stand in front of a US flag on a screen in Times Square in New York. © AFP / Ludovic Marin
The American-centric world is coming to an end, giving way to a new period of diversity in economics and other areas of international relations, Kremlin Press-Secretary Dmitry Peskov has said.
Peskov made the remarks on Friday, in response to an article in the Financial Times, in which US Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that Washington was aiming to cut Russia’s oil and gas revenues in half by 2030. Pyatt, who served as the US ambassador in Kiev during the 2014 coup, also said that American sanctions against Moscow would stay in place “for years come” – as long as it continues its military operation in Ukraine.
The Kremlin spokesman insisted that the restrictions by the US and its Western allies are not critical for Russia, as it has many other trading partners on the international stage. He told journalists that “the US might be the largest, but it’s not the only economy in the world. China is on the heels of US. There are also growing economies with their own needs for energy resources.”
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“The world is much more diverse than the US. And therefore, the American-centric world is coming to an end and a period of diversity begins, including in international economic relations,” Peskov stressed.
According to the spokesman, the Russian authorities did not doubt that the American sanctions would remain “for years to come,” even before Pyatt’s statement. Moscow is taking this reality into account while planning its policies, he said, adding that there is “also no doubt that the US will continue to try pressuring on Russia.”
The spokesman suggested that as a result of those “illegal” efforts, the Americans will be putting the whole system of world trade and economic relations under strain, “essentially destroying the existing format of those relations.”
Russia’s President Putin Vladimir Putin said that last month that “the development of a new and fairer world order based on the primacy of international law has been a prevailing trend” in recent years.
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Earlier, Putin accused the West of “destroying the system of financial, trade, and economic relations with their own hands” through their sanctions policies. However, he stressed that “real business cooperation” by other countries is leading to the emergence of a new international model “shaped not by Western standards [and] catering to the selected ‘golden billion,’ but all of humanity… and the developing multipolar world.”
