Russia’s central bank has no objection using cryptocurrencies for international transactions

The First Deputy Governor of

Russia

’s Central bank

Ksenia Yudaeva

said on May 31 that the government is interested in allowing the use of cryptocurrency for international payments. The move could help the country to evade the sanctions imposed by the West, Reuters reported.

Yudaeva

was quoted as saying in a briefing to the reporters “In principle, we do not object to the use of cryptocurrency in international transactions.”

The

Finance Ministry

said that allowing cryptocurrency to be used to settle international payments would help Russia counter the impact of Western sanctions imposed on Moscow since February after it waged war on Ukraine. The EU, the US, and other allies had collectively snapped Russia's access to its more than $600 billion of foreign currency reserves and shut out Russian banks from Swift, the international financial messaging system. The European sanctions have disabled and cut several Russian banks off from the global financial network. The Deputy Governor said that the Russian banks now have sufficient foreign currency liquidity which has helped to decrease the overall risks of financial stability to the country due to Western sanctions imposed on it

Russia has been working towards bringing a crypto framework. The

Ministry of Finance

of the Russian Federation announced the amendments for drafting a comprehensive crypto framework including crypto mining in April 2022. The bill took into consideration the standpoint of various government institutions on the matter.

The Russian government has eased its approach towards the crypto market from its earlier stringent stance on cryptocurrencies, where it called for a blanket ban on cryptocurrencies and crypto investments in December 2021. However, the senior bank official, Yudaeva said that the bank still considers the widespread use of cryptocurrencies a financial threat for Russia. She said, “We still believe that the active use of cryptocurrency within the country, especially within Russia’s financial infrastructure, creates great risks for citizens and users. We believe that in our country those risks could be reasonably large.”