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52 Opinion
The ruble is actively traded
bne March 2020
affecting the flow of cash from Russia’s extensive exports of oil and gas as the deals are settled by Russia’s leading state- owned banks which would suddenly have problems moving money over the border.
Finally the EU would become an innocent bystander caught up in the car wreck. According to the most recent data from Eurostat, Russia represents the fourth-largest destination of EU exports and the third-largest origin of EU imports as of 2018. Some member states like Finland, the Baltics and Bulgaria are even more dependent on trade with Russia. All EU member countries are heavily dependent on Russian energy imports.
As most of this trade is financed by Russian state-owned banks any sanctions on them with disrupt the circa $300bn of trade Russia does with Europe each year, causing losses for everyone.
The EU has its own sanctions on Russia, but they are milder than the US sanctions and the EU has not implemented the sanctions imposed by the US in the subsequent rounds to the 2014 measures.
Source: BIS, IIF
The ruble FX market and the OFZs are linked to a variety
of derivative products so any restrictions would have ripple effects throughout the financial system. And if sanctions target the ruble’s role in the international settlement system that would also have a knock-on effect on the energy market by
ALACO DISPATCHES:
I say Moldovan, you say Romanian...
Nicolae Reutoi of Alaco
Not long ago, while visiting my parents in Chisinau,
I searched my mother’s book shelves for a Jack London novel that I wanted to show my wife, a Russian native speaker. The book was in Cyrillic, a relic of pre-independence Moldova, then part of the Soviet Union. I eventually found it and handed it to my wife, who looked puzzled. No wonder. The text was written in Moldovans’ native language.
I had succumbed to a moment of linguistic blindness. It
was a pardonable lapse. Growing up in Chisinau in the late 1980s, we wrote our mother tongue – which some today
call Moldovan and others Romanian – in Cyrillic. The name distinction is a sensitive issue. Not so much for millennials like me, but for older generations – who experienced the Soviet Union, witnessed its break-up and the birth of an independent Moldova – what you call the language says a lot about your political leanings and identity.
Dinner parties have been known to get quite feisty on occasions when the language dispute rears its head. Politicians appearing on national television have been known to get hot under the collar over the issue. And in the early noughties an ill-conceived attempt at a Romanian-Moldovan
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dictionary was greeted with a mixture of bewilderment and hilarity. It was probably not dissimilar to the reaction many in former Yugoslavia must have had to their post-independence governments’ rebrand of Serbo-Croatian as Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.
Moldova’s linguistic controversy looks set to make headlines this year. Some suspect President Igor Dodon, who falls
into the camp that insists on calling the national language Moldovan, will look to make political capital from the dispute as he attempts to secure a second term in presidential elections in November.
The passions provoked by the issue must puzzle observers. For a traveler visiting Chisinau, there would be little to suggest Moldovans conduct themselves in anything other than the Romanian language. There is a strong rural dialect, which mixes Romanian and Russian words, again a hangover from Soviet times, but that is the only evidence of any linguistic divergence. The point of contention revolves purely around the name of the language, little more – and that is wrapped up in the recent history of the region. Formerly part of Tsarist Russia, Moldova reunified with Romania after the