MOSCOW (Dispatches) – Russian President Vladimir Putin says the U.S. is exploiting the dollar’s ‘dominance’ for sanctions and has warned the policy may rebound on Washington.
At a videoconference with representatives of international media organizations, Putin said late Friday in St. Petersburg that Russia has to adopt other payment methods because the U.S. “uses its national currency for various kinds of sanctions,” adding, “We don’t do this deliberately, we are forced to do it.”
Settlements in national currencies with other countries in areas such as military sales and reductions in foreign-exchange reserves held in dollars eventually will damage the U.S. as the greenback declines, Putin said. “Why do U.S. political authorities do this? They’re sawing the branch on which they sit,” he said.
Putin spoke a day after Russia announced it will eliminate the dollar from its oil fund to reduce vulnerability to sanctions.
Putin set a tough tone for his upcoming summit with U.S. President Joe Biden, accusing Washington of trying to contain Russia and citing its response to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a manifestation of the West’s double standards.
Putin said that arms control, global conflicts, the coronavirus pandemic and climate change are among the issues he and Biden would discuss at their June 16 summit in Geneva.
“We need to find ways of looking for a settlement in our relations, which are at an extremely low level now,” Putin said.
“We don’t have any issues with the U.S.,” he continued. “But it has an issue with us. It wants to contain our development and publicly talks about it. Economic restrictions and attempts to influence our country’s domestic politics, relying on forces they consider their allies inside Russia, stem from that.”
Putin reiterated that Russia rejects accusations of interfering in U.S. presidential elections, and he spoke critically of the U.S. response to the Capitol attack, which took place as Congress prepared to certify that Biden had defeated then president Donald Trump in the November election.
“They weren’t just a crowd of robbers and rioters. Those people had come with political demands,” he said.
Putin pointed out that the heavy charges against hundreds of participants in the attack were filed even as the U.S. and its allies strongly criticized Belarus’ crackdown on anti-government protests.
In separate comments to Russia’s Channel 1 state television, Putin added that he does not expect any breakthroughs from the summit with Biden, but added that he hopes that it will help “create conditions for taking further steps to normalize Russian-U.S. relations.”