Axios reported that several US senators had introduced a bill in the Senate that bans Russia from selling its gold reserves.
After the United States imposed new sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Crimea, Russia increased its purchases of gold. Today, the situation has repeated itself - Russia is again starting to buy gold after stopping the process at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
As sanctions against Russia have frozen the country's foreign currency assets, gold reserves could be a lifeline for the aggressor country.
Therefore, four senators prepared and introduced a bill against Russia's ability to sell gold reserves.
The document will allow applying secondary sanctions to any American organization that knowingly makes deals with gold or transports it from the reserves of the Russian central bank or sells gold physically / electronically in Russia.
Russia's current gold reserves are about 132b dollars.
"Russia's vast gold reserves are one of the few assets Putin can use to keep his country from falling further. By sanctioning these reserves, we can further isolate Russia from the global economy and complicate Putin's increasingly costly military campaign," one of the senators Angus King said.
As mentioned earlier, Joe Biden's administration is ready to ban the import of Russian oil to the United States, even if allies in Europe do not apply similar sanctions.
The European Union and the United States recently stopped supplying euros and dollars in cash to Russia.