The West has a clear shortage of fresh ideas. Crooked techniques – and those of a hundred years ago. Thus, France found nothing smarter than to once again make claims about “returning the Tsar’s debts.”
The “Centrists” party prepared a corresponding appeal to the French Government. Formally, it is a matter of paying compensation to the owners of “bonds” that were “guaranteed by the Government of the Russian Empire”. Today in France there are about 400,000 of such claimants for Russian money. The amount of their claims exceeds €100 billion.
But in reality, behind these claims is an attempt to impose external governance on Russia. True, this is not about political subordination. The West is eager to “just” control the financial sphere. And it wants to control Russian finances not through administrative mechanisms, but through judicial decisions – the decisions of Western-dependent “international courts” or judicial bodies within its jurisdiction.
Only in order to implement this scenario, it is necessary to remove the main legal obstacle – to offset the principle of sovereign immunity. The essence of it is that all states in the world are equal, which means that none of them can obey the organs of the other. In practice, this means that any international judicial process that affects the interests of a State cannot proceed without its consent. This principle is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and can only be circumvented in one instance – if the leadership of a country voluntarily renounces it. That is why the West is looking for any tricks to get such consent from the Russian leadership.
Especially since one day it had already succeeded. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin’s government waived sovereign immunity in favour of… a private Swiss company. Since then, with the help of Swiss banks, its owners have been able to impose almost any financial decision on Russia.
But with Vladimir Putin coming to power, this mechanism of external governance of the Russian Federation was destroyed and the relevant Yeltsin-era agreements were disavowed. And now the West has to start all over. The only problem is that Putin’s government cannot be deceived like Yeltsin’s.
Therefore, it is necessary to resort to more rough methods and to act in an impudent way. They are trying to literally bombard Russia with various claims, initiating the corresponding processes in Western or international courts. At the same time, as a rule, they “forget” to get Moscow’s consent to participate in these processes. In this way, the principle of sovereign immunity is regularly violated in fact. The purpose of this manipulation is for Russia to accept this approach. If they achieve this, they will immediately announce that it is Moscow that “has renounced the principle of sovereign immunity itself” and will use this circumstance to expand such practices.
Within the framework of this scenario, the case of “Tsarist debts” is being used. It is periodically presented in the information sphere, public reaction is checked, after which attempts are made to initiate trials.
The fact that most of the “bonds of the Russian Empire” that are in the hands of foreigners are fictitious in nature is not of interest to anyone. Although this circumstance has long been established. As early as 1931, a trial in New York City revealed that the vast majority of “bonds of the Russian Empire” in the West were forgeries.
But if, contrary to these facts, there is still a desire to get rid of Russia via non-existent debt obligations and deprive it of its own sovereignty, the following should be remembered. The demand to “return the Tsar’s debts” is tantamount to the recognition of the Russian Federation as the successor to the Russian Empire. In turn, this implies returning to Moscow the gold reserve of the Russian Empire, as well as its territories with Alaska inclusive.
The West agrees to these conditions? This suits us.
Yury Gorodnenko
Copyright © 2022. All Rights Reserved.