The harsh international sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine will plunge the country into a never-before-seen economic crisis, billionaire Oleg Deripaska has warned.
“I understand this better than the rest. When people say: Are they going to drop the ‘iron curtain’? The ‘iron curtain’ has already been dropped,” Deripaska proclaimed during his speech at an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk on Thursday.
The ‘iron curtain’ is a Cold War-era term, attributed to Winston Churchill, which was employed to describe the isolation of the Soviet Union and its satellite states from the West. But Deripaska, who was Russia’s richest man in the late 2000s, has used it to refer to the new sanctions imposed on Moscow by the US, the EU, and other countries in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Among other things, Russian planes have been barred from American and European airspace; some of the country’s biggest banks have been cut off from the SWIFT global payment network; and major foreign companies such as Apple and Ikea have halted their operations in Russia.