We’ve never seen it, and we probably won’t. According to Russian experts, the unprecedented and catastrophic sanctions with which Joe Biden scares Moscow are unlikely to be implemented in practice. It was about banning our banks from conducting operations with dollars. Such a step would harm, first of all, the States themselves and the image of the dollar as a world currency. While the Russian economy has a sufficient margin of safety against such threats.
Mikhail Belyaev, a financial analyst with a Ph.D. in economics, believes that sanctions are unlikely to have a significant impact on the Russian economy. “Instead of the dollar, you can always find another currency that can be used to pay. Bilateral transactions are a voluntary affair of the two countries. The fact that it is customary to pay in dollars does not mean that it is written on the tables of world trade,” he is sure.
Meanwhile, the Russian economy continues to strive to get rid of dollar dependence. To do this, in international transactions, settlements in national currencies are increasingly used. For example, when trading with China and the EAEU countries. Turnover indicators do not suffer from this. On the contrary, last year Russia earned $489 billion from exports, an increase of 47%. And at the same time spent 300-plus billion to pay for imports. We can see that the difference between these figures has resulted in a record current account surplus of $120 billion. This is not just a return to pre-pandemic levels, but also a serious increase in revenue compared to 2019.
At the same time, the country is actively diversifying exports, relying not only on oil and gas. In 2021, Russia supplied more than $191 billion worth of non-resource non-energy products to foreign markets, this is a new historical figure. The main importers were China, Kazakhstan and Belarus. By the way, the list includes the United States. Over the first five months of last year, the total export of Russian goods to the United States increased one and a half times.
Russia’s own dependence on imports is gradually decreasing due to the process of import substitution, which has intensified since the imposition of sanctions. In the West, this trend is worrying. The European Union even filed a complaint with the WTO, due to the fact that European companies have lost access to tenders of Russian state-owned enterprises. The complaint refers to public procurement in the amount of almost 300 billion euros.
Against this background, threats to disconnect Russia from the international SWIFT system sound at least strange. After all, this would mean huge losses for those countries that are interested in trading with us. Russia is now actively developing its own analogue – SPFS. 335 users have already connected to this system, including 38 foreign ones.
In general, any restrictions that are now being discussed in the West, Russia must withstand. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov made this statement the other day. He noted that the country managed to create a solid safety cushion. We are talking about international gold and foreign exchange reserves. Which by the beginning of this year amounted to 630.5 billion dollars. And also about the National Welfare Fund. The presence of which, according to the minister, reliably protects Russia from external factors. Including sanctions threats.
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