Russia will respond in a tit-for-tat manner to any foreign moves to seize Russian business and private assets abroad, Russian Security Council deputy chairman Dmitri Medvedev has indicated.
“They are also threatening to seize the money of Russian citizens and Russian companies abroad. Simply everyone, without any sanctions, out of spite. This will have to be responded to in a symmetric manner, through the arrest of the funds of foreigners and foreign companies in Russia, according to a country-by-country principle. And perhaps through the nationalization of the property of those persons/entities which are registered in unfriendly jurisdictions, like the USA, the EU and other ‘singing’ nations of the Anglo-Saxon world that will take part in all of this,” Medvedev wrote in a post on his VKontakte page.
Medvedev wrote that Russia already has a “rich experience” in this area, and a “strict” law on this subject ready to be implemented. “So the fun is just beginning,” he quipped.
Medvedev claimed that neither he nor members of his family have or ever had any foreign bank accounts or property abroad, and suggested that the restrictions imposed on members of the Russian Security Council by the EU on Saturday “will not change anything” – something that’s “clear even to ignorant people in the State Department.”
“Sanctions,” he wrote, are being implemented “from the political impotence arising on the basis of the inability to change Russia’s course.”
Medvedev also argued that restrictions “could serve as an excellent occasion to review our relations with those states that have imposed them.”
The US and its allies in Europe and Asia slapped Russia with new sanctions on Thursday after Moscow and its Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republic allies launched what President Putin referred to as a “special military operation” aimed at the “demilitarising and denazifying” Ukraine.
The restrictions include the freezing of the assets of Russian banks and individuals by Britain, the closure of airspace to Russian airlines by several Eastern European countries, EU restrictions targeting the technology and banking sectors, and US sanctions against Russian financial institutions and “corrupt billionaires,” as well as export controls. The American restrictions also include threats to impose secondary restrictions against those companies that do business with the affected Russian entities.