The central bank’s first public report in months shows that the country’s gold stockpile has continued to grow over the past year.
According to a report from the country’s central bank, Russia’s gold reserves grew by 1 million ounces in the past year, bringing the total to 74.9 million ounces as of March 1.
Because of Western sanctions, the Bank of Russia stopped telling the public how much gold was in its international reserves. The last time it said how much it had was in February 2022, when it said it had 73.9 million ounces of gold.
As of March 2023, the regulator’s report on Wednesday showed that the value of gold reserves was $135.6 billion. Reports say that the country’s total holdings of foreign currency and gold fell from $617 billion to $574 billion over the course of a year.
RIA Novosti looked at data from Russia’s central bank and found that the amount of gold in Russia’s international reserves has gone up to 23.6% over the past year, while the amount of foreign currency has gone down to 71.5%.
Reserves are usually made up of foreign currency, but over the past year, their value has dropped by 8.7% to $410.65 billion.
As part of sanctions over the Ukraine conflict, Western central banks froze about half of Russia’s foreign currency reserves at the beginning of March 2022. The rest of the holdings are gold, foreign currency kept in the country, and Chinese yuan assets.
Before the war with Ukraine broke out in February of last year, Russia’s foreign exchange reserves had reached a historical high of $643,2 billion.
Moscow has said over and over again that freezing its assets is theft and goes against international law. The Kremlin says that the use of the US dollar as a weapon in the sanctions war against Russia has hurt the idea of international reserves.
