Russia has imposed ever-increasing costs on foreign companies that choose to leave the country, but is now asking foreign banks that are preparing to leave a condition they can’t meet even if they wanted to, Business Insider reports.

“We expressed our position as it is: we will let foreign banks go hard, it will depend on their decision to unfreeze Russian assets,” said Deputy Finance Minister of Russia Oleksiy Moiseyev at the forum held last Friday.

Reuters reminds that Western powers and their allies in other parts of the world seized assets of the Central Bank of Russia worth more than 300 billion dollars after the invasion of Ukraine began last year.

The decision was strongly condemned by many officials in Moscow, including President Vladimir Putin and former Prime Minister and President Dmitry Medvedev.

“In general, a significant part of our assets were essentially stolen by some Western countries,” Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov also said when asked last October about the European Union’s proposal to hand over Russian assets frozen by the West to Ukraine.

As for Oleksiy Moiseyev’s new claim last week, it is not entirely clear how many of Russia’s “frozen” assets outside the country are in Western bank accounts. But the most important aspect of this situation is that the banks did nothing but follow orders from national governments and European authorities.

Banks cannot unblock sanctioned assets on their own account.

The Russian government must agree to the sale of foreign banks to local players

While more than 1,000 foreign companies have announced they will exit the Russian market, Business Insider estimates that about half of that number have already liquidated all of their Russian businesses.

However, it should be noted that this is due at least in part to the obstacles created by the Russian authorities. The Russian Ministry of Finance, which must approve each individual transaction, processes an extremely limited number of applications each month.

As for the banking sector, Raiffeisen continues to operate in Russia, being the largest Western bank in the country headed by Vladimir Putin. At the beginning of August, the Austrian bank again announced that it intended to leave Russia, but decided to raise the salaries of its employees.

In the first half of the current year, the profit of Raiffeisen in Russia increased against the background of reduced competition in the market as a result of the departure of some of the Western competitors.

Asked about foreign banks, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Oleksiy Moiseyev said on Friday that only one major Western bank was still awaiting approval to sell its assets in Russia.

He did not want to name the bank, but claimed that it was not Raiffeisen.

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