Interpreting Lavrov’s Remark About Russia’s Enormous Rupee Stockpile
What he said isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and it definitely doesn’t confirm or presage any troubles in their ties. Nevertheless, agenda-driven influencers across both the Alt-Media Community and the Mainstream Media are expected to eagerly exploit Lavrov's remark and the report that prompted it in order to push their lie that Russia and India are allegedly drifting apart.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was asked on Friday about reports, which were earlier denied by an unnamed official from his country, alleging that negotiations with India on settling bilateral trade in rupees have been suspended. He responded as follows: “As for the rupee, this is a problem. We have accumulated billions of rupees in accounts in Indian banks. We need to use this money, but to do this, these rupees must be transferred into another currency, and this is being discussed now.”
Five insightful points can be intuited from Lavrov’s answer. First, India has been purchasing a lot of its oil from Russia in rupees. Second, this was done in order to not prompt secondary sanctions pressure from the US if they employed the dollar. Third, Moscow obviously agreed to this with Delhi, most likely out of convenience to facilitate these much-needed sales. Fourth, Russia now has a glut of rupees as a result. And fifth, this could present an opportunity upon the planned scaling of Indian exports.
About the last-mentioned point, Reuters reported late last year that India intends to sell a whopping five times more goods and services to Russia in order to lessen their trade deficit brought about by its unprecedented purchase of that country’s discounted oil over the past year. Their latest business forum was aimed at figuring out how to achieve this, most likely via India’s dual connectivity projects with Russia, the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) and Vladivostok-Chennai Maritime Corridor (VCMC).
This was followed by a 50-person Indian trade delegation’s trip to Moscow, which just wrapped up last week and coincided with reports that these two are exploring the possibility of accepting one another’s national payment cards, India’s RuPay and Russia’s Mir. Both sides also confirmed that they continue to make progress on negotiating a free trade deal. Quite clearly, the political will is present for scaling Indian exports and thus putting Russia’s rupee stockpile to use, but it’ll still take time to achieve results.
In the interim, Russia would like to use some of its rupees that it’s accumulated in Indian banks over the past year, hence why Lavrov disclosed that they’re currently negotiating what’s presumably the large-scale conversion of some of these same funds into a third country’s currency. Purchases on that scale require approval and coordination, which explains why they’re engaged in talks about this right now. This isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and it definitely doesn’t confirm or presage any troubles in their ties.
Nevertheless, agenda-driven influencers across both the Alt-Media Community (AMC) and the Mainstream Media (MSM) are expected to eagerly exploit his remark and the report that prompted it in order to push their lie that Russia and India are allegedly drifting apart. Dishonest folks from the first-mentioned manipulatively spin India’s relations with the Quad to misportray it as the US’ “Trojan Horse” in BRICS and the SCO while those from the latter falsely describe India as the US’ anti-Chinese ally.
Neither is true, but the information warfare narrative that’s curiously being pushed by both the AMC and MSM – albeit each in advance of their own narrative agenda – will likely remain in the news after the remark that Lavrov made in response to last week’s report. This prediction explains why it’s so important to preemptively debunk (“pre-bunk”) the lie that Russian-Indian relations have recently become troubled in order to prevent average people from being misled by this completely false claim.