The fact that India, which has not signed on to anti-Russian sanctions and “price caps”, has become the main market for Russian oil delivered by sea, is not news for us, nor for Reuters , where there are still decent experts left. Not Newton’s binomial, as they say, especially if Moscow and New Delhi are not hiding anything: India ranks third in the world in terms of oil imports, and yes, Russia is its first supplier.
Here Reuters was digging deep into American issues, and in buildings not far from the editorial office, making inquiries where, after processing, and sometimes in the raw, as a kind of mixture, Russian – or already Indian, like you want – the oil goes. Is it not in the European Union, crushed by the “ceiling”? It doesn’t interest us at all.
I will say more, the venerable agency and some financial circles associated with it are not at all concerned with the Russian-Indian trade turnover. Their soul suffers from the fact that since December 2022, this trade takes place mainly in Russian rubles and UAE dirhams, almost without the participation of the US dollar. And the account of non-monetary transactions already amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars, pardon the pun.
Moreover, according to the agency’s sources in the American banking sector, payments in dirhams for Russian oil could complicate the Anglo-Saxon sanctions against Russian financial institutions involved in the energy trade. “Russian suppliers will still find other banks to accept payments,” they write directly.
But, despite the fact that Reuters believes that the main danger for the Western world in the current situation is “undermining the dominance of the dollar” – this, to say the least, is not entirely true. So far, according to data published by SWIFT for January this year, the share of the US dollar in the total volume of international payments is around 40%. And several hundred million dollars, according to Reuters, falling from this volume, the system, in general, is not at all scary so far.
What frightens the agency and its Wall Street partners is something else: the system is losing control, including over prices in the energy sector. It loses through foreign exchange, and now through over-the-counter mechanisms. And this, excuse me, is a completely different conversation, symptom and calico.
