While President Dmitry Medvedev during his recent visit to the USA achieved solid support for Russia’s rapid inclusion in the WTO, the country’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin might now have put the membership plans in jeopardy.
Putin in a television interview this week said his government intends to increase import duties on foreign cars. That would be a violation of WTO regulations.
Experts now speculate whether Putin’s statement were made with purpose.
“Perhaps he got mixed up. I’m not sure, but this statement needs some elaboration”, Aleksei Portansky, from the trade policy institute of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, told the Financial Times.
