Putin Floats Creating SCO Bonds
By Reuters | 01 Sep, 2025

Squeezed out of normal international trade settlement channels, Putin proposes an implausible alternative financial system spanning the 10 members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting in the SCO Plus format at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Sputnik/Sergei Bobylyov/Pool via REUTERS

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday proposed that members of the 10-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) should sell joint bonds, a step that would mark a major deepening of their economic cooperation.

At a summit of the group in China, Putin also floated the idea of a joint payments system for trade settlements.

The SCO, set up in 2001, is the successor to the Shanghai Five, a grouping of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, set up in 1996. It now also includes India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus and Uzbekistan.

"We advocate the issuance of joint bonds of member states," Putin told SCO heads of state in China's northern port city of Tianjin.

He also said he supported "the creation of our own payment, settlement and depository infrastructure" and "the formation of a bank of joint investment projects".

"All this will increase the effectiveness of our economic exchanges and protect them from fluctuations in the external environment," Putin said. 

Russia has been pushing for settlement mechanisms which avoid the U.S. dollar and the euro, after Western sanctions on payment systems and Chinese banks disrupted Russian trade following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

Putin said the SCO economies had grown on average by 5% in 2024. 

(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow; writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)