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Russia vows to stop U.S. 'from taking over Ukraine'
Two rounds of negotiations held by American, NATO and Russian officials in Geneva and Brussels did not help to alleviate the concerns of the Russian authorities regarding the NATO bloc.
“The North Atlantic Alliance is preparing an information background for deployment of its troops to Ukraine, and this poses a security threat to both Russia and European countries,” said the Chairman of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin.
"NATO seeks to take over Ukraine," he said, adding that Moscow …
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Deploying troops to Ukrainian borders has cost Russia almost $10 billion
The biggest fall of the Russian stock market since the spring of 2020 began to affect the Russian National Welfare Fund (NWF), which has more than a third of its holdings in ruble-denominated assets.
At the end of December, the size of the NWF, where since 2017 Russia has been storing oil revenues, decreased by 320.9 billion rubles ($4.17 billion), reported the Russian Finance Ministry.
Real expenditures from the fund, including infrastructure projects, amounted to only 0.3 billion rubles ($3. …
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U.S. and Europe abandon the idea of disconnecting Russia from SWIFT
The United States and the European Union abandoned the idea of disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT interbank payment system as part of a package of sanctions for aggression against Ukraine, Handelsblatt reports, citing sources in the German government.
The initiative, which was first launched back in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, is again considered too risky. This step could destabilize the global financial system and provoke the development of an alternative …
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Germany: disconnecting Russia from SWIFT will have a nuclear bomb effect on world markets
The future chairman of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich Merz, said he believes that restricting Russia's access to the international interbank SWIFT system will have a "nuclear bomb" effect on the world markets.
"Loss of confidence in the SWIFT system could be like an atomic bomb for the capital markets, as well as goods and services markets," the DPA news agency quoted Merz as saying. "I foresee a massive economic downturn in our economies if something like this happens. …
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Poland: Russia can attack Ukraine in the coming days
Russia continues to amass its troops on the border with Ukraine, which may indicate a possible invasion in the coming days, said the head of the National Security Bureau of Poland Paweł Soloch.
"Of course, the situation is a stalemate, but we must be prepared for what the British Defense Minister said, that Russia may attack Ukraine in the coming days," PAP new agency quotes Soloch as saying.
Speaking about a possible scenario that Russia can use to attack Ukraine, Solokh noted that "any …