Free Republic

Last week, Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov confirmed that about $300 billion of Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserve cushion had been frozen as a result of Western sanctions. On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the move "theft." The collective West's decision to freeze Russian reserves abroad constitutes the bankruptcy of their obligations before Russia, and undermines faith in their currencies, President Vladimir Putin has said. "In the past weeks, a number of Western countries have taken illegitimate measures on the so-called 'freezing' of Russian assets. The collective West has factually drawn a line under the reliability of its...

A Republican and a Democratic senator have called on the Federal Reserve and the publisher of a foreign policy magazine to provide more details on 2015 meetings involving senior U.S. financial officials, a Russian central bank official, and Russian spy Maria Butina. Now, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley R-Iowa, and the top Democrat on that panel, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., want more information. The meetings involved Butina, now-former Russian Central Bank Deputy Governor Alexander Torshin, former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, and former Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs Nathan Sheets. They were reportedly arranged by the Center for...

MOSCOW. Sept 14 (Interfax) - Deputy Chairman of the Russian Central Bank Andrei Kozlov died in hospital at 5.30 a.m. Moscow time (0130 hours GMT), following the attempted attack on Wednesday night, a medical source told Interfax. "Kozlov died without coming to," the source said. A medical source told Interfax earlier that Kozlov had heavily been wounded in the head, and had sustained less sever wounds in the chest and the stomach. The banker was operated on, with the operation completed at about 5 a.m. Moscow time (0100 hours GMT). The source also noted that Kozlov had been taken...