Washington has turned its currency into a weapon of suppression and punishment, the Russian foreign minister has said
The US and its allies are waging a hybrid war against Russia, but their aggressive sanctions are hurting the world’s poorest nations the most and backfiring on Washington, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stated.
Lavrov delivered his remarks at the Inventing the Future symposium in Moscow on Monday, where he asserted that the United States and its allies are reviving the spirit of the Cold War by declaring the need to eliminate perceived “threats” to their dominance from Russia, China, and other countries pursuing independent national policies.
By struggling to preserve its “privileged position,” Washington is “chopping down the branch on which it sits” and “destroying the system of globalization that they have fostered and promoted to the world,” according to Lavrov.
“The dollar, which for decades has been advertised to us as the common property of all mankind, has been turned into a weapon of oppression and punishment against geopolitical competitors and dissenters. In doing so, they have essentially written a sentence for the dollar as a global reserve currency and a means of international settlement,” Lavrov said. “The Western capitals have suddenly forgotten principles such as fair competition, the inviolability of property, the presumption of innocence, and many others.”
Washington has made a “big mistake” by weaponizing the dollar, President Vladimir Putin remarked at a BRICS summit last month, emphasizing that Moscow is not trying to undermine the US currency but is merely “forced to look for alternatives” in trade with its partners.
“The United States itself is withdrawing the dollar from circulation, as more countries begin to fear that they may be next. No one knows what they can be punished for,” Lavrov noted on Monday, recalling Putin’s words.
“The extraterritorial application of unilateral restrictions harms the poorest states, depriving them of affordable energy resources, food, fertilizers, and basic technologies, not to mention advanced scientific achievements and developments,” Lavrov said, highlighting that developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America suffer the most.
Over the past ten years, Russia has faced more than 21,000 sanctions across various sectors, from economics and trade to culture and sports, according to Lavrov. Russian financial institutions were largely cut off from the Western financial system in 2022 in response to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. As a result, Moscow has accelerated trade with international partners using their national currencies, a trend increasingly supported by BRICS members, who have shifted from using the dollar and euro for trade settlements.
