Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev said on Tuesday that the world diamond market had no way of compensating for the loss of Russian diamonds due to Western sanctions.
“An artificial restriction of the supply of diamonds to world markets on the scale of Russian production cannot be compensated by other sources, as they do not exist,” Moiseev said.
The Group of Seven major Western powers has been weighing various proposals on how to trace the origin of diamonds entering Western markets, and a senior European Union diplomat has said the bloc is waiting for this to happen in order to impose sanctions on Russian diamonds.