19FortyFive: US hits Russia with 'financial nuclear weapon', but it fails

The United States and its allies used a "financial nuclear weapon" against Russia. However, it did not live up to expectations of the West, the 19FortyFive website said.

It goes about the decision of the West to freeze Russian assets that were kept abroad. The effect that those measures produced, just like the effect from the imposition of trade restrictions, turned out to be completely different from what the West expected.

Russia's GDP in 2022 is expected to shrink by 3.4 percent, the article in the publication says.

However, the scale of damage turned out to be much less than was originally thought. Some of the restrictions that the West resorted to were positioned as "financial nuclear weapons." These include such moves as disconnection of Russian banks from the international SWIFT system.

"The SWIFT exclusion was initially touted as a "financial nuclear weapon' - this was a grossly overblown assessment. SWIFT is just a message application commonly used in international fund transfers. Although exclusion from it certainly causes inconvenience, there are other means of communication for sending cross-border fund transfer instructions," the article said.

Russia's assets that were frozen in Western banks are evaluated at $300 billion. However, in early December last year, it was reported that only $100 billion of those assets were available. The remaining amount supposedly disappeared and could not be located.