The obligation that Moscow wants to impose on European countries to buy gas in rubles must not be triggered in a short time, as provided for by the decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who set March 31 as the last day to exchange gas terms of payment. The date in Moscow will be postponed to a later date, at least that is what Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a press conference on March 30, where he ruled out the implementation of the Moscow plan for the end of the current week. However, this plan does not seem to be abandoned, Peskov does not exclude expanding the list of goods exported from Russia, which must necessarily be paid for in rubles. A proposal coming from the Duma, with the Speaker of the Russian Parliament having hypothesized that payments in rubles would also be enforced for oil and wheat. According to Peskov, the postponement of the deadline was only for technical reasons, because the Russian central bank still needs time to develop the mechanism demanded by the Kremlin.
Peskov: “No breakthrough in the negotiations”
Referring to the negotiations in Turkey yesterday, March 29, Peskov dampened optimism about seeing significant progress in the KyivMoscow peace talks. According to Putin’s spokesman, these meetings have produced nothing new and there is still a lot of work to be done before an agreement is possible. Peskov nevertheless positively assessed the willingness of the Ukrainian negotiators to initiate them, to make concrete proposals and to put them on paper, all of which referred directly to Putin: “But otherwise Peskov added we can report nothing promising, no turning point”.
