The European Union is completely based on the Washington line and has no independent foreign policy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference after his visit to Algeria.
Lavrov threw “nails” against EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, saying he must not forget that he is “a top diplomat and not a military leader in the European Union”.
“However, we will probably see soon that this position of the top EU diplomat will disappear, because the EU has almost no foreign policy and is fully in line with the line imposed by the United States,” he said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the idea of Josep Borrell a theft. “This proposal is, as it were, a theft, which they do not even try to hide.”
What about Russia's foreign exchange reserves
We remind you that the Russian Central Bank had a large part of its foreign exchange reserves located abroad. Under normal circumstances this is a very common and advantageous practice of central banks. However, during the war, these assets “froze” in the context of sanctions imposed by both the US and the EU. In fact, the largest volume of Russian foreign exchange reserves was in France and amounted to 71 billion dollars. In total, about $ 300 billion in foreign exchange and gold reserves were “frozen”.
This measure was taken so that the Russian central bank could not use them to support the ruble, but also for the Russian government to repay its debt that was in foreign currency. That is, it was a lever of political pressure to stop the war and withdraw Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. That is why the formal form of this detention was not a seizure, but a “freezing” of the possibility for Russia to trade with them. Otherwise, their property status has not changed.
Jose Borel suggested in an interview with the Financial Times that the EU seize this money and use it to pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine, the cost of which is expected to be hundreds of billions of dollars.
