I translated an article form Russian press agency Interfaks:

The Russian Ministry of Finance, which has repeatedly announced plans to issue bonds in yuan, which have not yet been implemented, may place such debt securities before the end of the year, Reuters reports, citing sources in the financial market and the ministry.

The target date for the placement is early December, and the Ministry of Finance is counting on a wide range of investors: from banks and management companies to brokers operating in the retail client market, according to one of the agency’s interlocutors. Several issues worth the equivalent of 100 billion rubles each can be placed.

For the first time, the Ministry of Finance announced plans to place yuan-denominated bonds on the Moscow Stock Exchange back in November 2015. Since then, this topic has regularly appeared in discussions.

Initially, it was planned that these would be bonds placed on the Moscow Exchange, the buyers of which would be large investors from mainland China. This placement option was complicated by the need to resolve regulatory issues related, among other things, to restrictions for Chinese investors to purchase foreign securities, representatives of the Russian Ministry of Finance explained.

At the end of 2017, Western and Russian media sources claimed that the placement of bonds in yuan by the Ministry of Finance was a matter of several weeks, but in the end the deal did not take place, although these plans did not disappear from the agenda.

In September 2022, Timur Maksimov, then Deputy Finance Minister and in charge of borrowing, commented on the issue of placing bonds in yuan, saying that the Ministry of Finance has two models for placing such bonds. The first one is more complicated and involves the participation of Chinese investors. The second option is to place yuan bonds for local Russian investors. According to him, this model may make sense if the federal budget finances its foreign exchange operations in yuan, since in fact, such an allocation is the transfer of free yuan liquidity to budget accounts.

https://www.interfax.ru/business/1055852

Three financial market sources said …

Wow, three eh? .

One was not authorised to talk to the press, another was an expert familiar with the matter, and the third wanted their name withheld for fear of retribution.