Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony at the third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on October 17, 2023. Sergei Savostyanov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
Chinese banks are stopping yuan transactions with Russia, according to a report in the Izvestia newspaper cited by Reuters.
This is a result of Western pressure on China, said a Kremlin spokesman.
The US has increasingly used secondary sanctions against foreign banks that work with Russia.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor.
Several Chinese banks have reportedly restricted payments with Russia, prompting a Kremlin official to rebuke the West. According to one of Reuters quoted Message According to the newspaper Izvestia, Ping An Bank and the Bank of Ningbo have stopped processing yuan payments from Russia. A number of lenders have also imposed limited restrictions on Russian operations.
Pressure from the West is to blame, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed in a daily telephone conference with journalists. “Of course, the unprecedented pressure from the United States and the European Union on the People’s Republic of China continues, including in the context of relations with us,” he said, according to Reuters.
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Russian customers first noticed payment difficulties in January after the US expanded its sanctions authority to Russia-friendly institutions. Following the December mandate, Washington has increased pressure on foreign banks worldwide. It threatens traders in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates with further sanctions.
Even Raiffeisen Bank International, a Western lender in Austria, was targeted. Fearing similar repercussions, three of China’s four major state-owned banks had already suspended payments from Russia at the beginning of the year. This is a bad sign for Russia, whose dependence on Beijing has only increased since the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine in 2022. As the Western world increasingly rejects Russia, China has stepped in. Bilateral trade between the two countries exploded in 2023.
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However, China’s willingness to accommodate the West comes because its trade with the US is much larger than that with Russia, First Group’s Alexey Poroshin told Izvestia in February. “This, of course, creates certain problems, but cannot be an obstacle to the further development of our trade and economic relations (with China),” Peskov said, referring to Western pressure.
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