Dollar Being ‘Illegally’ Weaponized by West: Top Russian Banker
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The dollar and the entire Western financial system built around it has been jeopardized by the sanctions on Russia, the CEO of Russia’s second largest bank, VTB, said, adding that the dollar is illegally used by the Western countries as a weapon.
Asked about Russia’s push toward switching trade to national currencies, Andrey Kostin, speaking on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum on Tuesday, responded that it is done out of necessity rather than a targeted attempt to undermine the American greenback.
“The dollar is illegally used as a weapon. It should not be done like this – we’re talking about finance and the economy, why should it be used for other purposes than this. It should be free from political and geopolitical risks. That’s the only reason [for de-dollarization],” he stated.
To illustrate his point, the banker quoted a famous phrase from ‘The Godfather Part III’ movie, “finance is a gun, politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”
“And that is what we saw – the politicians in the West pulled the trigger and it’s been used against Russia, and not only Russia but other countries,” he explained, RT reported.
Kostin noted that while a decade ago nobody wanted to use local currencies in cross-border transactions and were content with using the dollar, now more and more countries are reevaluating this stance.
“We put forward the question of using local currencies ten years ago but nobody wanted it at the time – why, they said, we can use the dollar, it’s good – and it was good until we faced the situation when America started to threaten us, threaten other countries, saying ‘if you don’t do this, if you don’t do that we’ll cut you off from the dollar.’ If they had not behaved like this we would never have raised this question,” Kostin said.
Kostin said that it is high time for countries in the Global South to create their own financial system based on national currencies.
“It is the right time for the Global South to start to build up this system because though the Global South removed the colonial system politically after World War II, the colonial system in the financial sector still exists, the empire built by the US with the help of its allies still works,” he stated. Kostin added that it is now “very clear to most of the world that if we continue like this there will be a threat of the [US] using the financial system as a weapon.”
The banker noted, however, that the idea is not to fight the Western financial system but to build a parallel system that will work to the benefit of the Global South.