G7 countries pushing for deal to ban sales of Russian diamonds

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, a sore point of non-enforced sanctions has been the free flow of diamonds from Russia into Europe and the West.

One of the reasons the sanctions have been bypassed is due to the revenue they bring to Antwerp and Belgian, arguably the diamond capital of the world, which relies heavily on Russian exports, which are thought to be up to 30 percent of Belgium’s diamond business.

The Russian diamond output is higher than that of Botswana and Congo, two key countries where raw diamonds are mined.

G7 governments are preparing an international ban on selling diamonds. Details were confirmed by a European government official involved in negotiations, who said the G7 are making progress in their preparations to announce an international ban on selling Russian diamonds. The announcement is expected to take place at the summit in Japan starting on May 19, as reported by Politico, a European news site.

The coordinated push by the G7 is aimed at preventing sanctions from being evaded through tactics such as importing Russian diamonds that have been processed and relabelled in other regions. Spacecode, a Swiss company, claims to have developed a solution to this problem: a new device that can determine the specific region of origin for individual diamonds.

Spacecode is a technology company that offers advanced intelligent inventory management solutions to the high-values diamond and jewellery industries, allowing the tracks and traces of diamonds in real time as well as solutions for anti-theft & anti-counterfeiting.