DVORIKI /Vladimir Region/, July 30. /TASS/. The sum of foreign debt to the USSR written off by Russia in all likelihood would have not solved current difficulties, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday in his speech before the participants of the Russian educational youth forum Terra Scientia.
"I don’t think that the sums you’re talking about, inherited from the Soviet Union, could have solved any domestic problems or may have provided any considerable assistance towards their solution, because these debts were over 90% uncollectable," he said, responding to the question on why Moscow forgave, according to some accounts, debts to the tune of $140 billion instead of using them for domestic purposes. Lavrov specified that there are a number of factors, which would have impeded the repayment of loans granted by the Soviet Union.
"To begin with, we have to consider that these debts were calculated when the Soviet Union was not an integral part of the international monetary and financial system, when the ruble was not integrated into this monetary system and when the currency rate was set just by the State Bank of the Soviet Union," the foreign minister noted. "Some remember the time when the dollar cost 63 kopecks and, of course, if we tally the debts at this rate - and the Soviet Union furnished a great number of loans, primarily to countries that fought colonialism and for independence, chiefly with military support - it would have been far from reality."
"Some of the Soviet-era debts are still here. We wrote off several billions of dollars of debts of African countries that were granted during Soviet times and that we never received, because in legal terms it is very hard to prove at which currency rate these debts were provided," the Russian foreign minister added. In addition, he said, many credits were granted to organizations which fought for independence and which were not state actors under the norms of international law. In this case, it is impossible to demand the return of the debts, as they initially were not based on any international legal agreements, Lavrov stressed. He noted that the sum named in the question might include the debts of the former Soviet republics compensated by Russia.
"They were, in fact, paid by Russia under the agreement called ‘zero option’ which stipulated that Russia would pay all the debts that the Soviet republics, which became independent, had at the moment and would receive in exchange all the property of the Soviet Union abroad," the foreign minister noted.