© Provided by Agencia EFE
International Writing, March 13 (EFECOM).- The Russian Finance Minister, Antón Siluanov, said this Sunday that the West has blocked some 300,000 million dollars of the gold and foreign exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Russia, due to the sanctions by the invasion of Ukraine, accounting for roughly half of Russia’s $640 billion reserves.
“This is about half of the reserves that we had. We have a total amount of reserves of about 640 billion dollars, and about 300 billion of them are now in a situation where we cannot use them,” Siluanov said, in an interview with Russian public television, according to the Russian agency.
The minister accused the West of putting pressure on China to limit Russia’s access to its yuan reserves.
Siluanov recalled that part of the Russian Federation’s gold and foreign exchange reserves are in yuan, so the West is trying to get China to restrict Russia’s access to its currency as well. “And we see the pressure exerted by Western countries on China to limit mutual trade with China. Of course, there is pressure to limit access to those reserves that we have in yuan,” he said.
But he opined: “I think that our association with China will still allow us to maintain the cooperation that we have achieved, and not only maintain it, but also increase it in the conditions in which the Western markets are closed,” stressed the head of the Ministry of Finance.
The head of Finance assured that Russia will not reject its debt obligations and will pay in rubles as long as Western countries continue to keep gold and foreign exchange reserves frozen, and stressed that the country has enough resources to guarantee the production of the necessary goods. EFE
Note to subscribers: Agencia EFE has temporarily suspended news production from Russia due to the threat posed to its journalists by the recently approved reform of the penal code. EFECOM will continue to report as much as possible from other places about this serious crisis.
(c) EFE Agency