19 April. Interfax-Russia.ru – Russia considers the “freezing” of its international reserves unprecedented, and is going to discuss these decisions, said Elvira Nabiullina, chairman of the Bank of Russia.

“Of course, this is an unprecedented “freeze” of gold and foreign exchange reserves, we will prepare all legal claims, we are preparing to present them, because it is unprecedented on a global scale – the gold and foreign exchange reserves of such large countries have been” frozen “, – Nabiullina said during the discussion annual report of the Central Bank with the faction of the Communist Party in the State Duma.

On the eve of the head of the Central Bank confirmed that due to receipts, Russia can dispose of about half of the gold and foreign exchange reserves (GFR). “This is gold, yuan, and they do not make it possible to regulate the foreign exchange market in the domestic market,” Nabiullina said. Earlier, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russia had been deprived of access to $300 billion of its reserves.

According to the results of 2021, the international reserves of the Russian Federation amount to $612.9 billion ($481.4 billion – foreign exchange assets and $131.5 billion – gold). The share of gold in reserves at the end of 2021 reached 21.5%. In terms of currency, the most investments were made in financial instruments denominated in euros – 33.9% (in dollars, the equivalent of about $ 208 billion), 17.1% ($ 105 billion) were received in the share of assets in Chinese yuan ($ 105 billion), in US dollars – 10, 9% ($67 billion), in British pounds sterling – 6.2% ($38 billion), in Japanese yen – 5.9% ($36 billion), in Canadian dollars – 3.2% ($20 billion), in Australian dollars – 1% ($6 billion), in Singapore dollars – 0.3% ($2 billion).

The composition of the international reserve also includes special reserve rights (SDRs, special drawing rights, currency of account, working currency by the International Fund, IMF) and a reserve position in the IMF.

“As for the IMF, I don’t see such risks that they arrest. We really have part of the gold reserves in the form of a special reserve right (this is called SDR), their liquidity is also quite low, it’s hard to turn them into other forms of foreign exchange reserves. There, mainly in the IMF SDRs that we liked on quotas.

She recalled that the Central Bank, with a sharp reserve, took into account the risk of possible financial and geopolitical risk. “We continue to accumulate and count, to diversify our gold and foreign exchange reserves. The gold and foreign exchange reserves were divided into two parts,” the chairman of the Central Bank said. The first part of the reserves (in dollars, euros and pounds) became the basis of the domestic market from the crisis, the second (in gold and yuan) – in case of a geopolitical crisis.

Nabiullina is narrow that the CBR is the most popular among the world’s regulators – RMB holders.

“Our reserves are still damaged, not damaged, “frozen”, they cannot be used, but they cannot be withdrawn, they are not expropriated, they are not damaged, they are “frozen”, and we will, of course, dispute this in all cases,” – noted the head of the Central Bank.