The economic war between Russia and Ukraine is coming to British shores
The countries are currently in the middle of a dispute about the failure of Ukraine to repay a bond worth $3 billion. Russia's Finance Ministry has now officially filed a lawsuit in the UK over the case.
Finance minister Anton Siluanov confirmed that Russia had filed the lawsuit with the High Court in London on Wednesday, speaking at a press conference in Moscow.
Reuters reports that at the conference, Siluanov said Moscow had engaged in "repeated unsuccessful attempts to encourage Ukraine to constructive dialogue on debt restructuring and to recognition of the fact that the Eurobond Russia invested in are official credit and the claim should be settled on terms better than those Ukraine proposed to its private creditors."
Siluanov didn't explicitly say why Russia had chosen Britain as the location for the filing, but argued that he believed that the UK's transparent, independent judiciary would let Russia's interests be protected.
The lawsuit is the latest in a line of tit-for-tat disputes, bans, and lawsuits that have occured since the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was "reunified" with Russia by way of well-equipped, organised, and trained "self-defence units," who were actually Russian special forces, nearly two years ago.
Russia first announced that it was suing Ukraine in January, just after Ukraine installed a moratorium on servicing its debt as it struck a restructuring agreement with all of its creditors apart from Russia. In other words, it stopped paying back Russia but carried on paying back everyone else.
This led to Russia and Ukraine fighting publicly about the state of affairs and various economic and financial disputes between the two countries have intensified.
For example, a few days before Russia announced its intentions to sue Ukraine, Ukraine cut the power supplies to Crimea, which Russia annexed in March 2014, again. The following day Russia cancelled a free-trade agreement and imposed new trade restrictions against Ukraine.
Here's the full statement from the Russian government (emphasis ours):
So far there has been no official comment on the lawsuit from the Ukranian government, although an email from the country's Finance Ministry on February 11 said that the country has "an unwavering commitment to reach mutually acceptable outcomes with all its creditors" according to Bloomberg.
This is a developing story, and Business Insider will update it as more information becomes available.