Billions in Russian oil sale profits are stuck in Indian banks, marking a blow to President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to stop using the U.S. dollar for trade.
Commodities such as oil, gold and wheat are typically traded around the globe in U.S. dollars, the world’s reserve currency.
However Russia’s financial system was essentially isolated by Western sanctions imposed after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, making his country unable to make transactions in greenbacks, thus limiting trade.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Billions in Russian oil sale profits are stuck in Indian banks, marking a blow to President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to stop using the U.S. dollar for trade.
Putin has tried to get around this by selling oil to countries such as China and India in their local currencies, the yuan and rupee respectively, raising fears this would undermine the strength of the U.S. dollar abroad.
“India operates a partially convertible capital account, which entails that the [Indian rupee] can be swapped for foreign currencies and vice-versa for limited reasons,” according to Aditya Bhan, of the Observer Research Foundation, a global think tank.
“A further worry is that internationalizing the [Indian rupee] could curb the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) ability to manage domestic money supply and affect interest rates according to prevailing macroeconomic circumstances.”
"We talked with [Indian Foreign Minister] Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in Jakarta and discussed bilateral issues, including such problems [as the mechanism of payments between Russia and India].
In the current situation, many billions of rupees have accumulated, which have not yet found their application, and our Indian friends have assured that they will offer promising areas where they can be invested," Lavrov said on September 10, according to TASS.
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