Comment by riffraff

but it's not easy to come by large amounts of Philippine pesos in Russia, cause no-one wants to hold significant amount of foreign currency they can't use for anything else. In some cases it may even be legally problematic.

That's why international trade uses "strong" currencies, which are very liquid: you can generally get USD/EUR and then trade them for anything else with a limited spread. Good luck converting Hungarian forints to Lao kips.

Being cut off from USD is why news of Russia resorting to barter[0][1] have occurred in the news since they got cut off from the US trading system

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/russia-oranges-trade-barter-pakista... [1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/first-russia-china-barter-tr...