The head of Russia’s federal crime-fighting agency proposed on Saturday to return key sectors of the economy to state ownership to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine, Reuters reported.

Moscow has already seized assets or bought them at a deep discount from some Western firms that left Russia or scaled back operations after the invasion.

“We are, in fact, talking about economic security in the war,” said the head of the Investigative Committee Oleksandr Bastrykin at the conference, which was broadcast online. “Let’s go down the path of nationalization of the main branches of our economy.”

For Bastrykin, who reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, it was an unusual foray into economic policy.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the communist Soviet Union, Russia undertook widespread and often chaotic privatization.

Some of the state’s most valuable assets ended up in the hands of so-called oligarchs, many of whom later sold their firms or were forced to cede control to the state under Putin.

The Russian economy and state treasury are largely dependent on the production of oil, gas and metals.

Gazprom, Russia’s largest natural gas producer, is already controlled by the state. Its largest oil company, Rosneft, is not formally controlled by the government, but is run by Igor Sechin, a longtime ally of Putin.

Moscow does not call its intervention in Ukraine an invasion and says it had to act to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population and avoid a threat from NATO – arguments that Kyiv and the West reject as baseless pretexts for a war of aggression.