Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier said that the risks posed by US sanctions need to be alleviated by switching to alternative currencies and moving away from using the dollar, and underlined the need to switch to payments in national currencies and in world currencies, instead of the dollar, Sputnik News reported.
The declining predictability of US policy casts doubts on the reliability of the use of the US dollar in mutual trade operations, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin told Sputnik on Sunday.
According to Pankin, the reduction in the use of the dollar is a reaction to the current geopolitical situation.
“The decrease in the predictability of the US economic policy and their uncontrolled introduction of unreasonable restrictive measures call into question the reliability and convenience of using the American currency as the priority currency in contracts,” Pankin told Sputnik.
he deputy foreign minister said that in such a situation, companies and countries are forced to take measures to minimize economic losses and transaction risks.
“In this light, the expansion of the use of national monetary units in trade operations with other states is becoming increasingly relevant and becomes an important area of the current foreign economic agenda,” Pankin said.
In an interview with Chinese media in late March, Russian top diplomat Sergey Lavrov called on Beijing to reduce sanctions risks by strengthening our technological independence, by switching to payments in national currencies and in world currencies, alternative to the dollar. According to Lavrov, the US and other western countries are no longer capable of using classical diplomacy and only resort to one tool in the international arena – sanctions, which benefit no one, as evident by the losses that EU businesses have been suffering because of anti-Russia sanctions.
Lavrov has also said that the administration of US President Joe Biden is sticking to the same sanctions policy as former administrations.
