Putin's foreign minister says freezing Russia's currency reserves was 'thievery' and that the Kremlin didn't expect such harsh sanctions

• Putin's foreign minister called the freezing of Russia's currency reserves "thievery."
• Sergey Lavrov said that the scale of sanctions after Russia's invasion of Ukraine came as a shock.

Russia's foreign minister called the freezing of Russia's currency reserves in light of its invasion of Ukraine "thievery" and said the country did not expect that level of sanctions.

Sergey Lavrov spoke to students in Moscow on Wednesday.

According to The New York Times, he said about the West's freezing of Russia's central bank reserves that "nobody who was predicting what sanctions the West would pass could have pictured that. It's just thievery."

The US and European countries were among those that froze Russian reserves.

Russia has about $640 billion in foreign reserves.

Russia's finance minister, Anton Siluanov, said earlier this month that about $300 billion had been frozen.

Other sanctions on Russia include the blocking the trade of luxury goods and heavy sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson, described the sanctions on oligarchs as "state banditry" earlier this month.