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With the war between Russia and Ukraine, the power that bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies can have in the financial system has become evident, to the point that the United States and the European Union (EU) desperately seek to regulate the assets. so that Moscow does not benefit from them. Their goal is to block your access to industry-related platforms.

From various US and European sectors the idea of regulating cryptocurrencies gains more strength. Yesterday, the president of the Federal Reserve (Fed), Jerome Powell, addressed the issue of Ukraine and Russia in the United States Congress.

Powell said there is a need for a framework in particular, with ways to prevent these unbacked cryptocurrencies from serving as a vehicle for terrorist financing and general criminal behavior tax evasion and the like.

Separately, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mark Warner, Jack Reed, and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In the letter they asked for explanations on the actions the Treasury Department is taking regarding cryptocurrencies in the context of sanctions policy, especially against Russia.

The senators expressed that they are concerned that criminals, rogue states, and other actors may use digital assets and alternative payment platforms as a new means of concealing cross-border transactions for nefarious purposes.

They have said that their restlessness continues to grow given the current scenario with Russia. Russian entities are preparing to mitigate some of the worst effects of the sanctions that have been placed on the country by using the variety of cryptocurrency-related tools at their disposal.

The Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also released a document called Russias Harmful Foreign Activity Sanctions Regulations, which came into force yesterday, March 2.

This will allow the United States to take action against transactions, including made with cryptocurrencies by banned Russian entities.

The rule encompasses all deceptive or structured transactions or dealings to circumvent any United States sanctions, including through the use of digital currencies or assets or the use of physical assets.

The president of the United States himself promoted a measure to prevent exchanges from helping Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to be an escape valve for sanctioned Russian individuals and organizations, as reported by CriptoNoticias.

Along the same lines as the United States, the European Union (EU) is also discussing measures that block the use of cryptocurrencies in Russia. This, at a time when the economy of the Eurasian country receives great blows, to the point that the European subsidiary of Sberbank, the main Russian bank, would be in bankruptcy or probable bankruptcy, according to statements by the European Central Bank (ECB).

French Finance Minister Bruno le Maire said that the EU wants to prevent Russia from circumventing the sanctions imposed by using cryptocurrencies.

We are taking measures, in particular on cryptocurrencies or crypto assets, which should not be used to circumvent the financial sanctions decided by the 27 EU countries, the French official commented.

He added that the sanctions have had an effect on Russia, hitting the financial structure of that country and leaving its central bank with no opportunity to protect the ruble, the Russian national currency.

According to an investigation by CriptoNoticias, it was possible to determine that the ruble has fallen 24% against the US dollar in a week. Taking into account that bitcoin has rallied in the last seven days, the total currency of rubles now has a dollar value lower than the market capitalization of bitcoin.

For his part, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner said the G7 is also considering taking further action to prevent listed individuals and institutions from switching to unregulated crypto assets. We are working to achieve this in the context of the German presidency of the G7, according to the Reuters agency.

The sanctions that may arise with the passing of days from Europe and the United States, are born after, on February 28, Ukraine requested support to round up cryptocurrency users located in Russia. In addition, he called for all Russians to be blocked from cryptocurrency exchanges, Visa, MasterCard payment systems, and even metaverses.

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The US and the European Union use the conflict with Russia and create a regulatory fence over Bitcoin - D1SoftballNews.com

European Union lawmakers have removed a controversial paragraph that would have made all proof-of-work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) illegal.

The Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, headed by Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) rapporteur Stefan Berger was originally scheduled for February 28. However, due to the vehement opposition over the language on the passage, fearing that it would be misinterpreted as a de facto Bitcoin ban, the vote was delayed last week.

According to the new report by a German news outlet, paragraph 61 (9c) has been scrapped. The vote for the much-anticipated market regulatory act targeting the crypto industry is yet to be rescheduled. Further clarifying the development, Berger tweeted,

The paragraph is no longer in the text. The report has yet to be voted on in committee. In this vote, we will see where the majorities lie. The decision has not yet been made #MiCA.

The passage in question argued that no cryptocurrencies could be created, sold, or traded within the European Union region that does not follow environmentally sustainable consensus mechanisms.

It also mandated that all assets would have to meet minimum environmental sustainability standards. If the latest version of the draft passes the required number of votes, it will then face trilogue debates, including the European Commission and Council, in addition to the Parliament.

Despite the latest move, global cryptocurrency regulations continue to wrestle with the growing concerns surrounding the environmental impact of PoW-based assets.

Its a similar story for Europe as well. 2021 witnessed debates and discussions around crypto mining like never before. To that extent, several industry players have come forward in support of less energy extensive PoS networks while others have stayed away from adopting Bitcoin and other PoW blockchain-based crypto-assets.

Last year, Swedens financial services regulator, Finansinspektionen (FI), stated that cryptocurrency assets are a threat to the climate transition, and energy-intensive mining should be banned. The regulator also noted that Sweden requires renewable energy as cryptocurrency mining threatens its ability to meet the Paris Agreement.

More recently, Erik Theden, vice-chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), also called for a prohibition on PoW crypto mining based on the industrys high energy demands.

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The European Union Is No Longer Banning Bitcoin and Other PoW-based Assets - CryptoPotato

AUSTIN, Texas, March 1, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --Vyopta, the leader in digital collaboration user experience management, today announced its plans to further expand into Europe with the launch of its new European Union Vyopta cloud. This is in addition to the company's existing US Commercial and FedRAMP Government clouds in the U.S. The new European cloud will enable Vyopta to better serve its European customers.

"As we continue to support and expand our client base in Europe, we want to ensure that they are confident we can support secure data residency needs," said Alfredo Ramirez, CEO of Vyopta. "We chose to house the Vyopa EU Cloud in Germany because of their well-known high-security standards."

One of the world's leading car and truck manufacturers and a global leader in next-age digital services and technology consulting are two large enterprises that are among those that will be the initial group using Vyopta's EU Cloud. Other clients in the region include organizations in education, enterprise, finance, government, and healthcare.

Vyopta currently has an office in the UK and offers 24-hour customer service support to enterprises around the world.

About Vyopta IncorporatedVyopta, the leader in digital collaboration user experience management, has helped 40 million people collaborate better. Its Collaboration Performance Management and Workspace Insights applications have helped identify and address over 9 million issues. Vyoptahelps organisationsdeliver the best UCuser experience and optimisetheir UCand real estate investments. Hundreds of organisationsworldwide spanning 20+ industries use Vyoptato monitor 6 million endpoints and over 20 billion meeting minutes a year.

SOURCE Vyopta Inc

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Vyopta Expands its Cloud Services Footprint in the European Union - PR Newswire

Russias war in Ukraine is not only reshaping the strategic and political order in Europe, it is also upending long-held assumptions about the intricate connections that are a signature of the global economy.

Millions of times a day, far-flung exchanges of money and goods crisscross land borders and oceans, creating enormous wealth, however unequally distributed. But those connections have also exposed economies to financial upheaval and crippling shortages when the flows are interrupted.

The snarled supply lines and shortfalls caused by the pandemic created a wide awareness of these vulnerabilities. Now, the invasion has delivered a bracing new spur to governments in Europe and elsewhere to reassess how to balance the desire for efficiency and growth with the need for self-sufficiency and national security.

And it is calling into question a tenet of liberal capitalism that shared economic interests help prevent military conflicts.

It is an idea that stretches back over the centuries and has been endorsed by romantic idealists and steely realists. The philosophers John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant wrote about it in treatises. The British politicians Richard Cobden and John Bright invoked it in the 19th century to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws, the tariffs and restrictions imposed on imported grains that shielded landowners from competition and stifled free trade.

Later, Norman Angell was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for writing that world leaders were under A Great Illusion that armed conflict and conquest would bring greater wealth. During the Cold War, it was an element of the rationale for dtente with the Soviet Union to, as Henry Kissinger said, create links that will provide incentive for moderation.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the idea that economic ties can help prevent conflict has partly guided the policies toward Russia by Germany, Italy and several other European nations.

Today, Russia is the worlds largest exporter of oil and wheat. The European Union was its biggest trading partner, receiving 40 percent of its natural gas, 25 percent of its oil and a hefty portion of its coal from Russia. Russia also supplies other countries with raw materials like palladium, titanium, neon and aluminum that are used in everything from semiconductors to car manufacturing.

Just last summer, Russian, British, French and German gas companies completed a decade-long, $11 billion project to build a direct pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that was awaiting approval from a German regulator. But Germany halted certification of the pipeline after Russia recognized two separatist regions in Ukraine.

From the start, part of Germanys argument for the pipeline the second to connect Russia and Germany was that it would more closely align Russias interests with Europes. Germany also built its climate policy around Russian oil and gas, assuming it would provide energy as Germany developed more renewable sources and closed its nuclear power plants.

Benefits ran both ways. Globalization rescued Russia from a financial meltdown and staggering inflation in 1998 and ultimately smoothed the way for the rise to power of Vladimir V. Putin, Russias president. Money earned from energy exports accounted for a quarter of Russias gross domestic product last year.

Critics of Nord Stream 2, particularly in the United States and Eastern Europe, warned that increasing reliance on Russian energy would give it too much leverage, a point that President Ronald Reagan made 40 years earlier to block a previous pipeline. Europeans were still under an illusion, the argument went, only this time it was that economic ties would prevent baldfaced aggression.

Still, more recently, those economic ties contributed to skepticism that Russia would launch an all-out attack on Ukraine in defiance of its major trading partners.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, many European leaders demurred from joining what they viewed as the United States overhyped warnings. One by one, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi talked or met with Mr. Putin, hopeful that a diplomatic settlement would prevail.

There are good reasons for the European Union to believe that economic ties would bind potential combatants more closely together, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. The proof was the European Union itself. The organizations roots go back to the creation after World War II of the European Coal and Steel Community, a pact among six nations meant to avert conflict by pooling control of these two essential commodities.

The idea was that if you knit together the French and German economies, they wouldnt be able to go to war, Mr. Haass said. The aim was to prevent World War III.

Scholars have attempted to prove that the theory worked in the real world studying tens of thousands of trade relations and military conflicts over several decades and have come to different conclusions.

Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.

Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the worlds largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.

Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctionsintended to restrict Russias access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.

In terms of the current crisis, Mr. Haass argued, in some ways the economic benefits were not mutual enough. The Germans needed Russian gas much more than Russia needs exports, because they can make up for lost revenue with higher prices, he said.

Thats where Europe handled the relationship all wrong, Mr. Haass added. The leverage wasnt reciprocal.

Despite its huge land mass, nuclear arsenal and energy exports, Russia is otherwise relatively insulated from the global economy, accounting for 1.7 percent of global output. And since Russias invasion of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Putin has moved to isolate the economy even more to protect against retaliation.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that the willingness to impose such devastating sanctions against Russia may point to the flaw in that strategy. If Russias financial system was more integrated with those of the allies, they might have been more hesitant to take measures that could provoke a financial crisis.

At the moment, economic relations with Russia are running on parallel tracks. Countries opposed to Russias invasion of Ukraine have imposed a series of damaging financial and trade sanctions, yet Russian oil and gas exempted from the bans are still flowing.

The reality is economic interdependence can breed insecurity as well as mutual benefits, particularly when the relationship is lopsided.

Philippe Martin, the dean of the School of Public Affairs at SciencesPo in Paris, said that the 2014 agreement between Ukraine and the European Union may have marked a turning point for Russia. That translated into more trade with the E.U. and less with Russa, he said.

Mr. Martin has written skeptically that economic ties promote peace, arguing that countries open to global trade can be less worried about picking a fight with a single nation because they have diverse trading partners.

In the case of Russias march toward Kyiv, though, he offered two possible explanations. One is that no one including the European leaders who imposed them expected such crippling sanctions.

I think that Putin miscalculated and was surprised by the harshness of the sanctions, Mr. Martin said. The second interpretation is that Putin does not care about the impact that sanctions are having on the welfare of most Russians.

Which does he think is correct? I think both interpretations are valid, he said.

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Economic Ties Among Nations Spur Peace. Or Do They? - The New York Times

On January 13, 2022, the NGO Milieudefensie (the Dutch chapter of Friends of the Earth) announced that it had senta letter to 29 Dutch companies and financial institutions considered by Milieudefensie to be "Netherlands' large polluters." Not only has this letter been sent to energy majors, but also to entities from a variety of sectors, including pension funds, banks, consumer groups, and chemical groups. In this letter, the NGO called on the chiefexecutivesof these companies to draft a "climate plan" before April 15, 2022, detailing and explaining the actions that will be taken to reduce the companies' CO2 emissions by 45% in 2030 relative to 2019 levels, in line with the UN Climate Convention and the Paris Climate Agreement.

According to Milieudefensie,the ruling issued by Hague District Court on May 26, 2021,in the case against Royal Dutch Shell implies that every large CO2 emitter in the Netherlands has, at a minimum, an obligation to reduce its emissions in line with the global imperative that has been confirmed most recently by the Glasgow Climate Pact. Milieudefensie has indicated it is collaborating with the New Climate Institute to assess the plans of all companies and publish the results and a ranking in June 2022.

With this new initiative, Milieudefensie expects that, by implementing their "climate plan," the 29 companies targeted will individually reduce their CO2 emissions (scope 1, 2, and 3) by at least 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. AlthoughMilieudefensieannounced that it was not intending to start litigation against each and every company, it did not exclude taking "follow-up steps" against the addressees that do not comply with this demand.

Some of the targeted companies have already provided a response to Milieudefensie by pointing to their climate efforts, but none has providedfurtherinformation on whether they are planning to comply with the demand and provide the said "climate plan."

This action confirms the new face of NGO climate change activism, which is taking the form of increasingly concrete actions against companies. Rather than the traditional "name and shame," it is now transforming into a "name and change" initiative, under which NGOs seem to position themselves as "regulators" by imposing on companies the implementation of measures to mitigate climate change under the threat of litigation.

This kind of action is likely to be extended outside of the Netherlands and may create a risk of businesses receiving similar requests making climatechange-related voluntary commitments that they cannot keep. In light of such voluntary commitments, the risk of businesses being held to a standard later that is not contemplated now is significant and should be carefully considered before providing any response to such requests.

Caution is therefore advised when establishing a response to this new kind of action, and absolute statements or commitments on climate change mitigation measures should be avoided or drafted carefully unless there is certainty that they can be fulfilled.

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Climate Change Litigation in the European Union: The Netherlands - JD Supra