During a meeting with Andrei Kostin, head of the second largest Russian bank, VTB, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Tuesday about “negative trends” in the US banking system and stressed that, in this context, the increase of the sovereignty of the Russian banking sector has been ‘timely’.
For his part, Kostin assured the president that the Russian banking sector is “safe” and reported that since the fourth quarter of last year, the VTB has worked with “positive dynamics in all areas.” In addition, he stressed that precisely because of the Western sanctions, the Russian banking sector “developed a certain immunity and increased its sovereignty.”
“Look what is happening now in the US: the biggest banking financial crisis since 2008, and it is already spreading to Europe. This is exactly what we were talking about, that sanctions are double-edged,” Kostin stressed. The head of the VTB stated that the anti-Russian sanctions destroyed “the world trade system”, causing inflation to rise. “The West’s attempts to deal with this in a standardized way have led to the depreciation of bank assets,” he added.
The banker stated that his bank is already building a new infrastructure to carry out all financial operations in rubles and currencies of friendly countries, adding that “now you have to learn to work in a new way.” «I think that in a few years it will be very possible to significantly restructure the financial system. And of course I think it will look different,” Kostin told the Russian president. with RT