Russia urged India to deepen its investments with the sanction-hit country’s oil and gas sector as it is keen on expanding the sales networks of Russian companies in Asia’s third-largest economy. “Russia’s oil and petroleum product exports to India have approached $1 billion, and there are clear opportunities to increase this figure,” said Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, in a statement shared by Russia’s embassy in India late on Mar. 11. “We are interested in further attracting Indian investment to the Russian oil and gas sector and expanding Russian companies’ sales networks in India,” Novak told the Indian minister of petroleum and natural gas, Hardeep Singh Puri. Stock market to remain closed this week Meanwhile, Russia"s central bank on Mar. 12 said it has decided not to reopen stock market trading on the Moscow Exchange from Mar. 14-18, except for some non-open-market transactions and transactions using the SPFI payment system. It said the foreign exchange market, money market and repo market would open at 0700 GMT on those days. The bank said it would announce the operating mode for the following week later. New routes for palladium supplies Amid the ongoing crisis, Russian mining giant Nornickel revealed that it has secured alternative routes for its palladium deliveries. Nornickel"s biggest shareholder, Vladimir Potanin, told Russian RBC TV that airspace closures had made supplying palladium particularly challenging. The task was to find new routes to bring down surging demand and price hikes as much as possible. Potanin said that Russia should try to preserve its economic position in markets that are now shunning Moscow over events in Ukraine, warning that confiscating the assets of companies that have fled Russia would shatter investor confidence for decades and take Russia back to the calamitous days of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. “The recovery of the Russian economy will depend on the depth of the crisis we enter,” Potanin said on Mar. 12. “The sooner this situation is resolved and the sooner normal dialogue with partners resumes, the softer the consequences for our country will be,” he added. (With Reuters)