“Firstly, the violence is disproportionate. Yes, Hamas committed atrocities on October 7th that should be condemned but Israel has killed at least 30,000 Gazans,” said Jeremy Kuzmarov, an author and the managing editor of Covert Action magazine joined Sputnik’s The Final Countdown. “So, the scale of atrocities is obviously much higher on the Israeli side, and that's what even people who supported Israel's right to self-defense have been now speaking out against because they say Israel's response is disproportionate.”

“The horrific bloodshed and suffering of these Gazan and Palestinian populations doesn't really strike the consciousness of most Israelis,” Kuzmarov suggested. “I mean, there is a small peace movement in Israel, and that may be true of the Jewish community in North America.”

“This is an indication that Russia wants to exercise a global role, particularly in response to what it perceives as NATO and American encroachments on its areas of vital interest,” said Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, who responded to the development on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program. “As Putin said recently – I'm paraphrasing – the more you do it to us, the more we're going to do it to you.”

“I think congressmen and people who comment in major media outlets are not going to want to make that equation, ‘look at what we are doing, therefore, we understand why they would be doing the same thing to us in order to establish parity and mutual respect,’” he argued. “I don't think that's how they're going to respond because that's not how they think. They think in terms of America's, frankly, God-given right to be the global hegemon.”

“It is customary to freeze accounts of your adversaries during wartime,” the author continued. “It is not customary to then help yourself to that money and put it to whatever uses you want and, in this case, the uses it's being put to are for Ukraine to buy weapons in order to kill Russians. So Russian money is being used to kill Russians. That is just so beyond outrageous.”

“China has a lot of American assets and European assets, and assets around the world,” noted host Angie Wong. “That could be seized at any moment. And the same treatment could be made of them if they don't play the way the G7 wants them to play.”

“Isn't this going to backfire on the US and some of the G7 leaders?” Wong asked. “Because ultimately that just means you're not going to get the foreign investments from Russia or China, maybe Saudi Arabia, whoever their next target is going to be.”

“[Dedollarization] means the demise of American power, because American power is based on the ability to pay bills by printing money,” noted US economist Paul Craig Roberts. “That would mean a massive US inflation. It'd be a kind of inflation that results from currency collapse. There’s nothing monetary authorities can do about that. Those kinds of inflations are the real inflations, the real deadly ones.”

“Not only is it a better idea than the current system where the dollar is the currency of transaction, [but] it's not a new idea,” said expert Linwood Tauheed on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program. “This is an idea that was proposed by John Maynard Keynes during the Bretton Woods meetings that eventually ended up with the dollar as the reserve currency.”

“The strength of the dollar is based on the demand for dollars,” the economist noted. “If the demand for dollars decreases because countries are able to buy in their own national currency, then the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies decreases because demand goes down. That means that the demand for other currencies goes up.”

“There's a democratization of the power of money in the international sphere,” he said. “And, of course, one of the issues of the BRICS is to democratize this process of developing so that it's not a few countries that benefit from trade, but all countries benefit from trade.”

“This [agreement] is totally symbolic. This is absolutely nothing; in fact, it's less than nothing,” said Moscow-based international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda, who joined Sputnik's The Critical Hour.

“The Biden administration knows that it has very little limited time and very little pull over Congress. It doesn't want to promise anything publicly that it can't back up or adhere to, even assuming that it's capable of being reelected in November, which is unlikely,” Sleboda said.