MOSCOW, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Russia and India, the second-largest importer of Russian oil, have built a functioning payments \u200cinfrastructure using roubles and rupees, which now account for \u200c96% of bilateral trade, a senior Russian banker said on Wednesday. <\/p>\n
Russia’s trade with \u200bIndia reached a record $70 billion in 2024, tripling since the start of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022, as India stepped up imports of Russian oil discounted due to Western sanctions. Bilateral \u200ctrade fell in 2025 \u2060when those sanctions were tightened but rebounded in the first half of 2026. <\/p>\n
“There are no problems \u2060with settlements between Russia and India. I am ready to say that this is one of the most reliable and best-established \u200bmechanisms for \u200bRussia’s payments with other countries,” \u200bsaid Ivan Nosov, head of \u200cSberbank in India. <\/p>\n
Russian businesses had previously complained about an “overhang” of rupees, an only partially convertible currency, in bilateral transactions, as well as trade imbalances, with Indian exports to Russia lagging behind surging imports of Russian oil. <\/p>\n
According to official data, 22 Russian \u200cbanks, including Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender, \u200bwhich was tasked with developing the \u200bpayments infrastructure, and 17 \u200bIndian banks are currently servicing bilateral trade. <\/p>\n
Nosov said \u200cthat 90% of all transactions between \u200bRussia and India \u200bare processed within 10 minutes, while more than 50% are processed in less than one minute. <\/p>\n
Indian Prime Minister Narendra \u200bModi hailed growing \u200ceconomic ties with Russia when he met President Vladimir \u200bPutin on Monday. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Elena Fabrichnaya; Writing by Gleb \u200bBryanski; editing by Philippa Fletcher) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MOSCOW, Sept 2 (Reuters) – Russia and India, the second-largest importer of Russian oil, have built a functioning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1182757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7655],"tags":[320541,730,2301,51924,332,34879,145443],"class_list":["post-1182756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-russia","tag-320541","tag-india","tag-moscow","tag-reuters","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-russian-banks"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117202394160148496","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1182756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1182757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1182756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1182756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1182756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}