In televised comments, he said such restrictions could also be introduced for other commodities, and noted that Russia was a major producer of natural gas, diamonds and gold.
But he said that measures did not need to be taken “tomorrow”, and must not cause damage to Russia itself.
“Russia is the leader in reserves of a number of strategic raw materials: for natural gas, this is almost 22% of world reserves, for gold – almost 23%, for diamonds – almost 55%,” Putin said.
“Please take a look at some of the types of goods that we supply to the world market … Maybe we should think about certain restrictions – uranium, titanium, nickel,” he told Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
“We just mustn’t do anything to harm ourselves,” he added.
Western countries have sharply cut purchases of Russian oil and gas since the start of the war in Ukraine but Russia remains a major supplier of metals to world markets, so a…
