WASHINGTON- The United States is committed to taking all measures to prevent Russia from benefiting from its holdings of International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights, a U.S. Treasury official said on Friday, saying Moscow faced big hurdles to doing so.

Russia received $17 billion in SDRs in a new IMF allocation last year, but to spend it Moscow would need to find a partner country willing to exchange them for underlying currencies in the form of an interest-bearing loan.

The United States and its partners, which account for the large majority of available counterparts in the IMF's SDR transactions system, will not undertake any such exchanges, the official said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder; editing by John Stonestreet)