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Russia intends to work on expanding settlements in national currencies, says Lavrov

Earlier, the Kremlin spokesman said that the the de-dollarization in Russia might be time-taking

MOSCOW, November 16. /TASS/. Russia considers it important to continue working on expanding settlements in national currencies, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

"We must continue vigorous work on further geographical diversification of external economic relations, primarily through deepening cooperation with Asian countries, as well as Latin America and Africa. Russian embassies in these countries are counting on bringing attention of business to dynamic markets, they regularly formulate specific proposals for this, and we see that these proposals are of increasing interest among Russian economic operators," Lavrov said.

Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier that the process of de-dollarization of the Russian economy cannot be short-term, but there are trends towards expanding the use of national currencies in international payments.

"This is a very complicated process. President Putin earlier has talked about the need to expand the practice of using the national currency, the ruble, in settlements with external partners and to reduce the share of the dollar in total volume of international payments. This is a process that cannot be short-term, it is time-consuming. It is a long and painstaking work," Peskov said.

At the same time, he drew attention to the fact that now there is a "tendency to expand the volume of payments in national currencies in various areas."

In September, Head of VTB Andrey Kostin stated that he considers inevitable for Russia and a number of other countries to transition to settlements in national currencies and refuse settlements in dollars if the United States continues to use the dollar "as a weapon.".