TL;DR
- India and Russia are advancing a CBDC-based payment system to settle bilateral trade, which nearly reached $60 billion in fiscal year 2026.
- Herman Gref, CEO of Sberbank, confirmed that the Bank of Russia and the Reserve Bank of India are working directly on the digital currency system.
- Russia deployed the digital ruble on September 1 and requires banks and large merchants to operate with it, under a mandatory adoption scheme.
India and Russia are negotiating a settlement mechanism based on a CBDC to channel their bilateral trade, which reached nearly $60 billion in fiscal year 2026 and aims to hit $100 billion before the end of the decade.
The initiative was confirmed by Herman Gref, executive chairman of Sberbank, during the annual BRICS summit held in New Delhi, where he noted that the Bank of Russia and the Reserve Bank of India are working directly on the framework, with the operational support of Russia’s largest bank. The Reserve Bank of India had not issued any official comment at the time.
CBDC: Tools of State Control
What officials present as a sovereign alternative to the SWIFT system is, at its core, an instrument of financial surveillance. Unlike Bitcoin or other decentralized cryptocurrencies, CBDCs are direct liabilities of the issuing central banks, which grants governments the technical capacity to track, freeze, or restrict any transaction in real time.
Russia made this clear with the deployment of the digital ruble on September 1: systemically important banks were required to offer the service and large merchants with revenues exceeding 120 million rubles had to begin accepting it. This is not voluntary adoption — it is a staged imposition.
India, for its part, has been testing its electronic rupee since 2022, with its circulation value rising from 234 crore rupees in fiscal year 2024 to more than 1,016 crore in 2025. The Reserve Bank of India plans to extend its use to cross-border applications, which will broaden state control over its citizens’ financial flows.
Russia Responds with Control to Its SWIFT Ban
The geopolitical backdrop is central. Since the main Russian banks lost access to SWIFT following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow accelerated its search for alternative channels.
The BRICS framework, which under India’s 2026 presidency envisions connecting national payment systems through CBDCs, fits into that strategy. Gref acknowledged that the trade imbalance between both countries exceeds $50 billion, strongly favoring Russian exports, and called for an increase in the flow of Indian goods into the Russian market.
The problem of rupee accumulation in vostro accounts, which for years limited the operability of bilateral trade, has been partially resolved through investments in Indian government securities. The payment architecture now being negotiated does not resolve the structural imbalances: it digitalizes them under direct state supervision through a CBDC.
