The US Department of Finance “carefully monitors any effort to bypass the sanctions related to Russia by using gold,” said Finance Minister Janet Yellen at a hearing in the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. This was reported by the Russian service BBC.
Yellen confirmed that operations with gold with Russian counterparties also fall under the decrees of US President Joe Biden, imposing sanctions against Russia; On March 24, the American Ministry of Finance explained that, in particular, the purchases of gold from the Russian Central Bank, the National Welfare Fund and the Ministry of Finance will fall under the sanctions.
In the early days of the war, Western countries froze Russian reserves stored in Western banks and in the currencies of Western countries, primarily in dollars and euros. This affected about half of the Russian pre -war gold and foreign exchange reserves in the amount of about 300 billion dollars. The rest was stored in the form of gold or Chinese yuan, this part of the reserves is still available to the Russian state, but its liquidity is limited.