None of BRICS members seeks to replace dollar — Russian diplomat

BRICS is pivoting toward payments in national currencies, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in an interview with Kazakh journalist Akmaral Batalova.

"No one in the BRICS community is raising the issue of replacing the dollar. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that over the past few years we have wound up in a situation where the Russian Federation has been deprived of the opportunity to use the dollar, by and large, for very many payments due to sanctions that block that," he said.

"The necessary option for us is to look for alternatives in the form of mechanisms of mutual settlements that would be fairly resistant to external negative impact, be immune to this kind of measures from outside," the diplomat went on to say. "The alternative is to switch to settlements in national currencies. That’s the path we are taking within BRICS."

According to Ryabkov, Russia already makes more than 90% of all payments with its BRICS partners in national currencies.