An ally of the president Vladimir Putin she warned Europe on Tuesday that Russia is moreć wrote a law to retaliate if the West seizes almost 300 billion dollars of Russian assets and uses them to helpć Ukraine. After President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine in 2022, the United States and its allies banned transactions with Russia’s central bank and finance ministry, freezing about $300 billion of Russian assets in the West.
Top officials in the United States want to seize assets to help Ukraine, although some bankers and European officials worry that such a seizure would set a dangerous precedent.
The American House of Representatives adopted a law on Saturday with a provision that enables the seizure of Russian property, but the lion’s share of Russian property is not in the US but in Europe.
“We have a prepared answer,” she declared Valentina Matviyenko known as Vale Časha, president of the Russian upper house of parliament, as reported by the state news agency RIA.
“We have a bill with retaliatory measures that we are ready to consider immediately.”
“And the Europeans will lose more than us,” said Matviyenko, who is a member of the powerful Russian Security Council.
Matviyenko did not specify what the response would be to the seizure of Russian property, which is still being discussed in the West. One option discussed by the West is to seize the income from the property without taking the property itself.
Putin says that the West has launched an economic war against Russia, claiming that the Russian economy, which grew by 3.6 percent last year, is resistant to Western sanctions aimed at stopping Russian trade.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said that any seizure of its assets would be contrary to the free market principles that the West proclaims and would undermine confidence in the US dollar and the euro, while deterring global investment and undermining and confidence in Western central banks.
Russia has said it will challenge any confiscation of its assets in court. Some Russian officials have suggested that if Russian assets are seized, foreign investment assets blocked in special accounts in Russia could suffer the same fate.
It is not clear how much money is in those accounts.
President of the lower house of the Russian parliament Vyačeslav Volodin he said on Monday that Russia has grounds to seize Western assets after the passage of legislation in the US Congress.
Volodin said that out of 280 billion dollars of Russian assets frozen abroad, only 5 to 6 billion dollars are in the United States, while about 210 billion euros are in the European Union.