MOSCOW. March 25 (Interfax) - The Western sanctions have helped Russia deal with a number of economic problems and have united its population, according to Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev.
"Russians always unite and mobilize all available resources at times of ordeal as a way of ensuring the country's sovereignty. The same is happening now: this foreign pressure has become an incentive for solving many problems in the Russian economy," Patrushev told the newspaper Izvestia in an interview.
"By imposing economic sanctions on our country, the West is trying to destabilize our domestic economy and create sociopolitical tensions in society," he said.
"The sanctions' authors can see that they aren't very efficient and sometimes even create the opposite effect," Patrushev said.
Before the sanctions were imposed, Russia was using foreign borrowings in addition to domestic funds to finance the real economic sector, and the entire infrastructure of financial transactions was controlled by foreign companies, he said.
"Nowadays, most funding comes from domestic sources, and a national payment system has been established," Patrushev said.
"In the past, the domestic machine tool and instrument making industries were import-oriented and their level of development was clearly insufficient. Now, these industries have a new lease of life thanks to the massive substitution of imports," he said.
"It seemed before the sanctions that we would never be able to provide ourselves with foodstuffs and were doomed to depend on imports. Now, independence regarding food has practically been established for major types, and Russia has even become a leading exporter of certain foodstuffs," Patrushev said.