Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that a number of other countries want to replace European and U.S. manufacturers on the Russian market and that prices in Russia would remain affordable despite a government ban on food imports from Western countries.

The Russian government called for the ban in response to Western sanctions related to the situation in the Ukraine.

"Russia cannot remain indifferent in this situation," Lavrov told the ITAR-TASS Top Officials project." I don't think this is a tragedy. Everything is solvable."

Lavrov said that Rosselkhozbank, the state's agricultural bank, was also targeted by Western sanctions for extending credit to Russian agricultural producers.

"This means that domestic farmers will face difficulties with financing, and their products will be less competitive as compared with imports from the European Union, which gets you know how many billions in subsidies," he said. "We can only dream about such subsidies.”