Siluanov: West froze almost half of Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves

The Russian Minister of Finance spoke about this in an interview with Pavel Zarubin in the Moscow. Kremlin. Putin" on the channel "Russia 1".

“This is about half of these reserves that we had. We have a total amount of reserves of about 640 billion dollars, about 300 billion reserves are now in a state in which we cannot use them”, - Siluanov said (quoted by RIA Novosti).

At the same time, Deputy Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation Irina Okladnikova reported on the likelihood of returning the frozen reserves of the Central Bank during the negotiations. In her opinion, this will not entail major consequences for the Russian economy.

On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the recognition of the DPR and LPR, and on February 24, a military special operation of the Russian Federation to protect Donbass began. Against the backdrop of events around Ukraine, Western countries and their partners imposed new sanctions against Russia, which, among other things, affected the banking sector and the economy of the Russian Federation. So on February 28 it became known that the European Union froze the assets of the Central Bank. This led to the collapse of the ruble exchange rate.