WASHINGTON, September 15. /TASS/. Russia’s embassy in the United States has slammed Washington’s decision to transfer 3.5 billion US dollars from the Afghan Central Bank’s reserves to the Afghan Fund as violating norms of international law.
"We have taken notice of the statement by the US Department of State and Department of Treasury regarding establishment of the "Afghan Fund" to which $3.5 billion of Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) reserves will be transferred. It is worth mentioning that the decision was taken contrary to numerous calls from American and world public, humanitarian and human rights organizations as well as prominent economists. We consider this step to contradict International Law and violate sovereignty of the foreign state," the embassy wrote on its Telegram channel on Wednesday.
"The people of Afghanistan have the right to independently command assets belonging to them without any external control," it stressed. "The Embassy of the Russian Federation strongly believes that such actions of the United States, no matter which humanitarian mottos it uses as a smokescreen, will only exacerbate misery of the Afghan people. The Embassy calls on Washington to think better of it, return the assets of the DAB to its owner and stop using colonial practices with regard to sovereign states."
The US Department of the Treasury said earlier that 3.5 billion US dollars from thee frozen assets of the Afghan Central Bank would be transferred to a Swiss trust fund to be further used to stabilize Afghanistan’s economy. Financial will be carried out bypassing the Afghan government formed by the Taliban radical movement.
After the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank suspended financial support for Kabul. The United States froze the Afghan government’s reserves in US banks to deny access to this money for the Taliban. The overall sum of frozen assets amounts to 9.5 billion US dollars, including seven billion in reserves kept in the United States.
The Biden administration said earlier that it was looking at a possibility of releasing half of nearly seven billion US dollars and save the rest to pay compensations to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terror attack.