AKIPRESS.COM - Ukraine is running the risk to lose 11-13 billion U.S. dollars if its citizens are banned to work in Russia.

“For many Ukrainian, work in Russia is the only source of subsistence,” but “only thanks to Ukraine’s actions, Russia will have to cut off this source,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned in his article published in the Monday issue of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily on Monday.

The Ukrainian authorities, which are declaring their “European choice” for the country are repeating mistakes of former President of that country Viktor Yanukovich, said Medvedev, reports TASS.

Abstracts from the interview to come put in the Monday issue of the newspaper were posted on its website on Sunday.

“Speaking of the “European choice” and possible joining the European Union in the next few years, the Ukrainian leader may be repeating Yanukovich’s mistake,” the Russian prime minister noted. “With the only difference that having realized his error, Yanukovich found courage to try to suspend this process.”

“The current leaders however are trying not to focus attention of their nation on “details.” They are silent about the fact that Ukraine does have all the standard liabilities of a candidate for the European Union membership whereas it has no candidate status,” Medvedev stressed.

PM Medvedev said Ukraine’s switch to use upgraded nuclear fuel from the United States at its nuclear power plants (NPP), built in the Soviet times, might bear dangerous consequences. “We cannot but be concerned with the intention of the Ukrainian authorities to undermine production cooperation in the sphere of nuclear energy.”

“The grim example of the dangerous impact of politics on the economy may be found in attempts to upload American fuel in Soviet-made power units of the Ukrainian NPPs,” Medvedev said.

The Russian prime minister said he was positive that “experiments conducted under pressure from the US manufacturers were technically unsafe,” adding that “attempts to substitute Russian produced nuclear fuel with the American were already made earlier in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, for instance, in the Czech Republic.”

“And these experiments resulted in serious technical problems and shutdown of reactors,” he said.

US-based Westinghouse and Ukraine’s national nuclear power company Energoatom have been cooperating on nuclear fuel supplies since 2000 and in April both companies extended a contract on supplies for Ukrainian nuclear power plants until 2020.

Energoatom and Westinghouse initially launched a project for diversifying nuclear fuel supplies in a bid to reduce Ukraine’s energy dependence on neighboring Russia.

Russia’s manufacturer of nuclear fuel, TVEL, was formerly the major fuel supplier for Ukrainian nuclear power plants.

Energoatom CEO Yury Nedashkovsky said in mid-September that supplies of Russian fuel for Ukrainian nuclear power plants did not cease and were delivered in line with the schedule.

Safety concerns regarding Ukraine’s switch to the US supplied nuclear fuel were repeatedly voiced by Russian experts and some officials, including by Sergey Kiriyenko, the head of Russian state-run nuclear corporation Rosatom.

The world’s worst nuclear accident happened in 1986 in Ukraine, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The explosion there and ensuing fallout from the critical nuclear meltdown contaminated vast areas in the then-Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.