MOSCOW, RUSSIA — Vyacheslav Volodin, a member of the Russian parliament, suggested on March 30 on his telegram channel that all of Russia’s export commodities, including grain, should be priced in rubles instead of the US dollar or euro.

Volodin, who is speaker of the State Duman, the lower house of the Russian parliament, wrote: “European countries have all the market opportunities to pay in rubles. There is no tragedy in it. The situation is much more terrible when there is money but no goods.

“Furthermore, it will be proper where it benefits our country, to expand the list of goods exported for rubles: fertilizers, grain, oil, petroleum, coal, metals and lumber.”

Volodin added that European politicians need to “end talks, stop looking for justifications why their countries cannot pay in rubles. They did everything themselves to undermine confidence in the dollar and the euro, so that Russia rejected mutual settlements in these currencies.”

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin also called for pricing all the country’s commodity exports in rubles in response to the economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its European allies following Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

In recent years, Russia has been the world’s leading wheat exporter, accounting for about 19% of the market.