Photo:Putin’s war in Ukraine: The EU on Monday adopted a law to set aside windfall profits made on frozen Russian central bank assets, it said on Monday, in a first concrete step towards the bloc’s aim of using the money to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine.
– Russia warned the West on Tuesday that Moscow would be very tough if the United States and European Union seized hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Russian assets.
After President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in 2022, the United States and its allies prohibited transactions with Russia’s central bank and finance ministry, blocking around $300 billion of sovereign Russian assets in the West.
The EU on Monday adopted a law to set aside windfall profits made on frozen Russian central bank assets, it said on Monday, in a first concrete step towards the bloc’s aim of using the money to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine.
“This is theft: It’s the appropriation of something that doesn’t belong to you,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Sputnik radio, TASS reported.
Zakharova said the response from Moscow would be “extremely tough” as Russia felt it was essentially dealing with thieves.
“Considering that our country has qualified this as theft, the attitude will be towards thieves,” Zakharova said. “Not as political manipulators, not as overplayed technologists, but as thieves.”
Russia has said that if its property is seized then it will seize U.S., European and other assets in responses.
The United States has proposed that working groups from the Group of Seven (G7) major industrialized nations explore ways to seize that money, according to the Financial Times.
What are these assets, where are they and what could Russia do if the assets were confiscated?
CENTRAL BANK RESERVES
Like other central banks, the Russian central bank placed some of its gold and foreign exchange reserves in liquid assets such as major currencies, gold and government bonds. About half of those reserves were held in the West.
The central bank has confirmed that about $300 billion worth of assets have been frozen in the West. Total Russian foreign currency and gold reserves totaled $612 billion at the time
Reuters
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.