Attempts by the Russian authorities to establish trade bypassing the dollar and euro have encountered new problems. Italy has stopped accepting rubles as payment for goods supplied to Russia, said the head of the Italian-Russian Chamber of Commerce (IRTC) Ferdinando Pelazzo, writes moscowtimes.
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What is known
According to him, the decision was made by the Italian Financial Security Committee, which unites several ministries.< /p>
“We started to conduct transactions, everything was fine, the conditions were acceptable. But then the Committee told us that it did not recommend this scheme,” Pelazzo said.
He added that the authorities cited circumvention of sanctions as the justification for blocking ruble payments. As a result, the mechanism, launched in February, worked for only about two months and did not even survive the test period, which was expected to last until May.
According to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, last year Russian importers paid 30% in rubles of all goods supplied from abroad. At the same time, the share in rubles in imports from Europe reached 47.9%, having added more than 7 percentage points over the year.
In total, goods worth $78.5 billion were imported from European countries last year. In comparison Since the first year of the war, European imports fell by 12.3%, and compared to pre-war levels by a quarter. In January-February 2024, supplies decreased by another 18%, to $10.1 billion.
Imports to Russia from G7 countries – the USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada – last year and completely dropped to the minimum in two decades.