U.S. ‘Shooting Itself’ With Steps That Harm Dollar, Putin Says

(Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said the U.S. is “shooting itself not in the foot but a bit higher” with sanctions and other steps that undermine confidence in the dollar.

“We aren’t ditching the dollar, the dollar is ditching us,” he told the VTB Capital forum in Moscow Wednesday. “The instability of dollar payments is creating a desire for many global economies to find alternative reserve currencies and create settlement systems independent of the dollar. We’re not the only ones doing it, believe me.”

Putin said recent steps to find alternatives to the dollar in trade have been paying off, noting that a contract to deliver S-400 air-defense missiles to Turkey -- which has been criticized by the U.S. -- was conducted without using the greenback. Russia is also working with partner countries to develop an alternative to the SWIFT financial-messaging system after threats that the country’s access could be targeted through sanctions.

Russia has been reducing its holdings of Treasuries and trying to find alternatives to the dollar in trade to protect itself from increasingly unpredictable U.S. sanctions. On Tuesday, the country also sold a foreign-currency bond in euros for the first time in more than a decade.

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