Seems Russia is now complaining the sanctions did not go through the UN or WTO-----and they had anticipated the whiplash to hurt Europe which it has apparently not done as Russia had hoped for.
From Interfax today:
Duma chief: West bypassed UN, WTO in sanctioning Russia
MOSCOW. Sept 29 (Interfax) - The head of Russia's lower house of parliament has accused the West of unlawfully bypassing the United Nations and World Trade Organization in slapping its Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia.
"All this time the sanctions that have been introduced bypassed UN decisions and WTO rules, have run against common sense, and have had nothing at all to do with the course of settlement of the internal Ukrainian crisis," State Duma Chairman Sergei Naryshkin said in a letter to the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the leaders of political groups in PACE.
It was five months after the West came up with its first set of sanctions that Russia took retaliatory measures, which is "a degree of restraint that is hard not to notice," Naryshkin said in his letter, whose text has been published by his office on Monday.
"We believed that the entire senselessness of this race of inflicting losses on each other would come home to our European partners, but this has never happened," he said.
Meanwhile, the war of sanctions has already done considerable harm to all European countries, Naryshkin said. "Responsibility for this now lies with all those who have given direct or indirect support to their main initiators," he said.
He claimed that "arbitrary interpretations" of facts had led to groundless accusations against Russia and to sanctions against Russian officials and businesses.
"Everyone has noticed that Europe did this as a follow-up to American measures," he said. "Was this not the reason that the European Union countries were prompted to be the first to introduce the so-called 'sectoral sanctions?"
"However, now that a new cold war is being forced onto the world, European politicians would be well-advised to be more careful - not to lie about a threat from Russia. That depends on the United States," Naryshkin said.
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