Russia and economic war by the west #3

The main issue is the market for jewerly diamonds in terms of final customers is basically Western countries. So they can just demand the diamonds come from this or that source. What will happen is a lot of smuggling where diamonds are replaced with Russian diamonds while being passed as something else.

This business is led by Amsterdam based Jewish tycoons.
And is one of the less moral existing, dealing with bloody diamonds forever.
Embarging on Russian-originated supply, when it can be sold by middlemen from any country, is a joke.

The EU has found extra-budgetary funds for Ukraine, by Gevorg Mirzayan for RTRUSSIAN. 02.20.2024.

The European Union has taken the first step towards confiscation of frozen Russian assets. The European Commission has finally approved a scheme under which income from frozen Russian deposits (that is, several billion euros) is withdrawn and subsequently used for the so-called restoration of Ukraine. “We have made it clear that these incomes, these windfalls, do not relate to Russian assets. We can take this income and invest it, for example, in the production of weapons for Ukraine. Thus, we can provide support to Ukraine directly from income or windfall from Russian assets,” said the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

The logic of European officials is obvious. The United States demands that it play first fiddle in financing the Kyiv regime. During the election campaign, it will be very difficult for Joseph Biden to allocate money to Ukraine, and without financial support, Zelensky will very quickly lose the war, after which Biden will lose the November elections.

Actually, Ursula von der Leyen and the European Commission don’t really need to be asked here: faithful daughters of the global ultra-liberal order, they place the interests of this order much higher than the interests of the national European states that they seem to govern. And the main interest of order now is survival, for which it is necessary to prevent Russia’s triumph in Ukraine by any means. That is, in a situation where the negotiation process with Moscow is considered an absolute heresy, to finance and arm Ukraine to the limit. In the hope that Russia will somehow miraculously collapse.

However, the problem is that the fanaticism of European officials is met with a banal lack of money. In order to cover the shortfall in American funding, the EU must double its funding for the Kyiv regime, and it will be extremely difficult to convince the European Commission to maintain it even at the current level. Especially against the backdrop of a falling standard of living in Europe and the beginning of mass protests by the population (take the same farmers' riots). The controversy and conflict surrounding the adoption of a four-year aid program for the Kiev regime showed that a number of national leaders (the most vocal, but not the most influential of whom was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán) would either oppose the allocation or try to blackmail the EU with a veto, which leads to the imbalance of the entire management system in the European Union.

And to ensure that the Kyiv regime continues to receive financial support without falling victim to internal unrest, Europe needs to find extra-budgetary funding. And not by millions, but by billions of euros. And the only such source was frozen Russian state assets, 2/3 of which (that is, almost €200 billion) were located on the territory of the European Union.

Yes, it’s impossible to just take them away. To do this, Russia must either declare war on EU member countries, or these countries must not recognize the current Russian government (and therefore its ownership of this money), or Moscow itself must allow the use of frozen funds to help Ukraine. None of these conditions are met, which means that the funds themselves cannot be seized. Yes, the EU can steal them through the thesis of “fair punishment” of Russia, but this decision will not find understanding among the eastern countries, which also store hundreds of billions of euros in Europe. They keep them because they are confident in their integrity. And if this confidence disappears, then this money will also disappear from European jurisdiction.

Therefore, Brussels is trying to find any legal grounds to take away at least something. Actually, he believes that he has already found it - in the form of confiscation of interest.

Moreover, you need to understand that this confiscation is only the first step, and other measures will follow. For example, allowing Ukraine to take out loans secured by frozen Russian assets (which, they say, will one day be confiscated). It is clear that this is a fraud. It is clear that interest rates will be very high (since the guarantor is, after all, someone else’s property). However, Kyiv doesn’t care: it won’t give this money back. He will simply offer creditors to take Russian “collateral”, after which they will have to go to court and try to win this money for themselves.

In Moscow, meanwhile, they are talking about the consequences for Brussels. First of all, legal ones. “We will pursue legally all those who are involved in such decisions... and their implementation. Russia will defend its interests,” said Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov.

Yes, it is useless to pursue Frau von der Leyen legally, but Moscow goes further. Russian officials say that they will respond with confiscation to confiscation, that is, take away property on the territory of the Russian Federation. There are, however, two important points here. Firstly, the lion's share of Russian money lies in Belgium, and there are not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Belgian property in Russia. In addition - and this is secondly - state property. After all, if we talk about a symmetrical response, then the confiscation of state assets must be responded to with the confiscation of state assets.

Therefore, it would be logical for an asymmetrical response to follow - and this is where von der Leyen comes to the rescue. Since the decision to confiscate money in Belgium is made at the level of the European Union, the response decision should not concern Belgian property, but that which belongs to all EU countries. And not only public, but also private - that is, all European Union investments in Russia.

Yes, it seems that this will not be entirely legal, but Moscow may well pull off the Brussels trick. Nationalize all property of EU citizens on the territory of the Russian Federation and pay them compensation from those same Russian frozen assets.

And then let European citizens go to their European courts for these euros.

https://russian.rt.com/opinion/1275456-mirzayan-rossiya-es-aktivy-dengi-ukraina

What do you think about the most recent sanctions? I mean mostly secondary ones - imho if now the other side is going to be punished there's a blow to buyers. It means demand will be affected - how much we'll need to see.

Retarded article as expected from the FT:
https://www.ft.com/content/0df913c7-aec2-471f-82e8-8d1398f7ab9f

Why didn’t the G7 and EU sanction all Russian banks? That would be equivalent to a trade embargo (prohibition of exports), since countries would no longer be able to pay Russia for its fossil fuel exports (oil, gas and coal), bringing those exports to a halt. Russia exports about 8mn barrels of oil, on average, per day. How to squeeze Putin’s revenue without driving up the price of oil sharply?

No it would not be a trade embargo you retards. Ever heard of bartering? Ever heard of using alternatives to SWIFT for bank payments? Like using corresponding accounts? Idiots.

In December 2022, the G7 and EU found an ingenious way forward, imposing a cap on the price that Russia can receive for its crude oil exports when these are transported in western-owned ships or use western services. In early 2023, a roughly equivalent cap was extended to cover refined products. Unfortunately, implementation of this oil price cap was at every turn undercut by a small number of western operators, especially Greek shipping magnates, that sold their oil tankers to “undisclosed” buyers — allowing Russia to export oil outside the cap.

Yeah real genius. Russia has oil to sell, and you don't want to transport it, so they just get their own ships. You don't insure their ships, so they make their own insurance scheme. How totally not expected... And I am sure those Greek shippers would love to keep their oil tanker ships when they don't have any oil to carry with them.

To be fair, the Greeks are not alone. The massive rise in western exports to central Asia and the Caucasus is another example of western business at work. For example, German exports of cars and parts to Kyrgyzstan have risen 5,000 per cent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is no way these exports are staying in Kyrgyzstan. They are going to Russia, where they help keep the war economy going, and the same thing is happening via Belarus, Kazakhstan and other places.

Yes I am fairly sure that the German civilian car parts being imported are used in Russia's war effort. Not.

keep the war economy going,

Wonder how he would react if in response Russia confiscated BP's and other UK companies assets in Russia, so reducing UK corporation tax revenue. As they surely would.

Western countries must become bolder in the issue of confiscating frozen Russian assets in favor of Ukraine, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in an opinion piece for The Sunday Times.

In his opinion, the West should first of all confiscate in favor of Ukraine the significant interest that these funds have brought in since the moment of freezing.

In the future, Sunak calls on the G7 countries to find ways to seize the assets themselves for their transfer to Kiev. - FRWL reports

Moscow. February 27. INTERFAX - The number of Russian individuals and companies under sanctions from at least one of the main Western initiating countries, as a result of the next round of restrictive measures, has exceeded 6 thousand. At the moment it is 6063 compared to about 1000 as of February 20, 2022 and 5444 at the end of last year, according to statistics from the X-Compliance system.
Since the beginning of 2024, the United States and its allies have already taken 1,019 sanctions measures against Russian individuals and legal entities, including 964 in the short period from February 22 to 25. In particular, 488 Russian individuals were included in the American lists, which is a record figure for one day, in Canada - 161, in Europe - 151, in Australia - 86.
In addition, Western countries began to increasingly actively impose sanctions against companies from third countries suspected of violating restrictive measures against Russia. According to statistics from the X-Compliance system, in total, the US, EU and UK imposed 483 sanctions against foreign companies under programs related to anti-Russian measures for the period from 2022 to 2024. Most often these are companies from the UAE, Cyprus, China, and Turkey.
The European Union, which in 2021 did not impose sanctions against companies from third countries as part of anti-Russian measures, introduced secondary sanctions against 8 companies in 2022, 21 in 2023, and against 16 from the beginning of 2024. The list includes 13- The third package of sanctions included organizations from such jurisdictions as India, Sri Lanka, China, Hong Kong, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Thailand, Belarus and the DPRK.
X-Compliance's regular sanctions statistics take into account 11 major foreign sanctions lists, including the US, EU, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Canada, Japan and Australia.
X-Compliance is a compliance risk management service created by specialists from the Interfax group. According to a survey by the National Financial Market Council, 63% of financial organizations use X-Compliance, in particular, to comply with Russian counter-sanctions.

https://www-militarynews-ru.translate.goog/story.asp?rid=1&nid=612361&lang=RU&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Soon the Rest of the World will decide that it´s better not to do business with the west.

Almost nothing can stop the flow of money in commerce. Where there is a will there is always a way.

Zlatti71
@djuric_zlatko
Former leading economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) Robin Brooks showed the scale of exports from the EU to Belarus and Central Asian countries

“Poland’s exports to Belarus reached a new historical high in December 23. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know this thing is coming to Russia," Brooks wrote.

The financier also points out that exports from the EU increased by $1.3 billion per month compared to the period before the conflict in Ukraine. - Ostashko reports

Moron bashes the EU but stays silent on the US increasing imports from Russia in important areas.