Kremlin warns West that ‘rubles for gas’ scheme is ‘prototype’ By Reuters

Por Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON, April 2 (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin’s ruble payment plan for natural gas is the prototype that the world’s largest country will extend to other major exports, because the West has determined the fall of the US dollar by freezing assets Russians, the Kremlin said.

The Russian economy is facing the most serious crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, after the United States and its allies imposed crippling sanctions over Putin’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s main economic response so far has been the March 23 decree that Russian gas exports be paid for in rubles, although the plan allows buyers to pay in the contracted currency, which is then exchanged for rubles. Gazprombank.

“It is the prototype of the system,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television Channel One of the ruble payment system for gas.

“I have no doubt that it will be extended to new groups of goods,” Peskov said. He did not give any deadline for that measure.

Peskov called the West’s decision to freeze $300 billion of central bank reserves a “theft” that would have already hastened a move away from reliance on the US dollar and euro as world reserve currencies.

The Kremlin, he said, wants a new system that replaces the contours of the Bretton Woods financial architecture established by Western powers in 1944.

“It is obvious that – although it is currently a distant prospect – we will arrive at a new system, different from the Bretton Woods system,” Peskov said.

Western sanctions on Russia, he said, have “accelerated the erosion of confidence in the dollar and the euro.”

Putin has said that the “special military operation” in Ukraine is necessary because the United States was using it to threaten Russia and Moscow had to defend itself against persecution of Russian-speakers in Ukraine.

Ukraine has rejected Putin’s claims of persecution and says it is defending itself against unprovoked aggression.

Russian officials have repeatedly said that the West’s attempt to isolate one of the world’s largest producers of natural resources is an irrational act that will drive up prices for consumers and send Europe and the United States into recession.

Russia has long been trying to reduce its dependence on the US currency, although its main exports – oil, gas and metals – are priced in dollars on world markets. The dollar is by far the most traded currency in the world, followed by the euro, the yen and the pound sterling.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)