Image Credits - Independent UK
Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko declared the U.S. dollar is “about to collapse” and is already being shunned across the world.
“Now no one needs either the dollar or the euro. And this is not only in Belarus and Russia – this is already in many countries,” Lukashenko stated, according to state media reports. The longtime Belarusian strongman claimed he was echoing sentiments shared by “many leaders” he has spoken with.
Lukashenko pointed to threats from Western nations to seize Russian foreign exchange reserves as precipitating this shift away from the dollar’s global preeminence. “I say because I talked to many leaders. Especially after the talk that these gold and foreign exchange assets that they kept in the West will be stolen from Russia,” he said.
The dire predictions about the demise of the U.S. currency as the world’s reserve come from a leader whose iron-fisted regime has drawn blanket sanctions from the U.S., Europe, and their allies. His remarks reflect an increasingly adversarial stance against the West in lockstep with Moscow amid Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Belarus has emerged as a key enabling partner for Russia, allowing its territory as a staging ground for the initial invasion. Lukashenko’s fraying relations with the West mirror the increasing isolation and de-dollarization of the Russian economy under Kremlin leadership.
Still, analysts caution against putting much stock into Lukashenko’s hyperbolic claims about the dollar’s imminent collapse. Despite sanctions pressure, the greenback has remained the world’s dominant reserve currency, still underpinning the vast majority of global financial transactions and trade flows. Fundamentally reshaping this reality would require a dramatic shift by most economies, which has yet to materialize.