Photo of BRICS leaders courtesy of Alan Santos/PR under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

In an interview with RT, the Foreign Ministry of Russia said that establishing a stable and reliable mechanism for foreign trade is now one of the key issues which the BRICS group pf nations will be discussing at their summit next month.

Discussing the summit, in Johannesburg, South Africa, on August 22-24, the ministry said, “Given the current international situation, this issue will be addressed during the upcoming meeting of the bloc’s leaders.” 

The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that using national currencies in mutual trade is complicated by their limited convertibility and higher volatility compared to the US dollar. It also acknowledged that the reported creation of a new BRICS single currency would be a “delicate” process.

As the de-dollarization trend has accelerated following the imposition by the Western nations of sanctions on Russia which have effectively cut it off from the Western financial system, the BRICS nations have been seeking ways to shift further away from the use of the dollar in the settlement of cross–border trade. Numerous other nations, as well as Russia’s fellow BRICS nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa – have begun to utilize currencies other than the dollar to settle their international trade transactions.

Russia introduced the idea of creating a BRICS currency last year. President Vladimir Putin noted in June that member states were developing a new reserve currency which would be based on a basket of currencies which belonged to the five-member bloc.