India’s efforts to internationalize the rupee have stalled following the failure of its negotiations to use it to trade with Russia.

Russia, which prefers the Chinese yuan, is hesitant to adopt rupee trade as that would leave Moscow with undesirable rupee reserves of more than $40 billion annually, Reuters reported last week.“We don’t want to push rupee settlement any more, that mechanism is just not working. India has tried everything we could to try and make this work but it hasn’t helped,” unnamed government sources told Reuters. This quashes the hopes of India’s oil and coal importers who were looking to reduce currency conversion costs.