Putin’s news conference coincided with heightened tensions over what Ukrainian officials say is a deployment of more than 120,000 servicemen on its borders more than seven years after Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula and Kremlin proxies seized large chunks of territory in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The volume of the e-commerce market in Ukraine in 2020 grew by 41 percent compared to 2019 and reached $4 billion, which is 8.8 percent of the total retail trade.

The country's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 2.7 percent year-on-year in July-September and by 1.5 percent compared to the previous quarter.

According to the World Bank estimates, 60 percent of the Ukrainians who may fall into poverty because of the COVID-19 outbreak do not currently benefit from any existing social protection programme.