OREANDA-NEWS  The initiator of the idea of disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT international payment system, as well as blocking the assets of the Central Bank, was ex-Bulgarian Prime Minister Kirill Petkov. This is reported by the newspaper Die Welt.

Petkov made such a proposal on February 25 at an informal meeting of the European Council in Brussels. There he communicated with European leaders who were initially against the introduction of this measure, but as a result, the European Commission supported the initiative.

Sanctions against the Russian Central Bank (CB), namely the freezing of the regulator's reserves in various national currencies, were imposed by the United States, the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom and Japan at the end of February 2022. This is how the countries reacted to the start of the special operation in Ukraine. At the end of April, the head of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, said that the total amount of the Central Bank's reserves frozen by Western countries amounted to about $ 300 billion. The blocking of Russian reserves abroad in Russia was called theft.