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'Rublegas' - The World's New Resource-Based Reserve Currency

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Pepe Escobar
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Installation of natural gas pipelines
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Saddam, Gaddafi, Iran, Venezuela - they all tried but couldn't do it. But Russia is on a different level altogether.

The beauty of the game-changing, gas-for-rubles, geo-economic jujitsu applied by Moscow is its stark simplicity.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's presidential decree on new payment terms for energy products, predictably, was misunderstood by the collective west. The Russian government is not exactly demanding straightforward payment for gas in rubles.

What Moscow wants is to be paid at Gazprom bank in Russia, in its currency of choice, and not at a Gazprom account in any banking institution in western capitals.

That's the essence of less-is-more sophistication. Gazprom bank will sell the foreign currency - dollars or euros - deposited by their customers on the Moscow Stock Exchange and credit it to different accounts in rubles within Gazprom bank.

What this means in practice is that foreign currency should be sent directly to Russia, and not accumulated in a foreign bank - where it can easily be held hostage, or frozen, for that matter.

All these transactions from now on should be transferred to a Russian jurisdiction - thus eliminating the risk of payments being interrupted or outright blocked.

It's no wonder the subservient European Union (EU) apparatus - actively engaged in destroying their own national economies on behalf of Washington's interests - is intellectually unequipped to understand the complex matter of exchanging euros into rubles.

Gazprom made things easier this Friday, sending official notifications to its counterparts in the west and Japan.

Putin himself was forced to explain in writing to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz how it all works.

Once again, very simple: Customers open an account with Gazprom bank in Russia. Payments are made in foreign currency - dollars or euros - converted into rubles according to the current exchange rate, and transferred to different Gazprom accounts.

Thus it is 100 percent guaranteed that Gazprom will be paid.

That's in stark contrast to what the United States was forcing the Europeans to do: pay for Russian gas in Gazprom accounts in Europe, which would then be instantly frozen. These accounts would only be unblocked with the end of Operation Z, Russia's military ops in Ukraine.

Yet the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to "bog down" Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere - certainly not Kiev - to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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