At a plenary meeting on Saturday, July 28, Russia’s Federation Council approved a bill providing for an increase in the value-added tax (VAT) from 18% to 20%, in addition to new social security tax rates.

The government of Dmitry Medvedev has claimed that the increase in the VAT will add 620 billion rubles to the federal budget each year.

At the same time, certain VAT benefits will remain. There is discussion of lowering the VAT rates to 10% for social goods: food items (with the exception …

The dollar’s status as the universal reserve currency “is becoming a problem” for the world economy, said Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference after the BRICS summit in South Africa.

According to him, the Kremlin “is well aware of what the dollar represents today”. “It is the universal reserve currency. To a greater or lesser degree the euro could aspire to this, but not entirely,” Putin observed.

The status of the dollar, for which there is no full-fledged substitute, is a …

In a statement published on the Ukrainian government web site, The Prime Minister of Ukraine, Volodymyr Groysman stated that his country will refuse to import Russian gas and will stop “bowing” to Russia now that Ukraine has its own reserves.

Groysman said he always wondered why Ukraine bought Russian gas despite the former having second and third natural gas reserves. “Once December used to come, the government bowed its head, bent a knee, and crawled to Moscow to negotiate the gas price and …