Script terminates due to locale setting issue

[softwareuser99]

On an Ubuntu 16.04 install, the script stops here:

Running hooks in /etc/ca-certificates/update.d...

done.
done.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pip", line 11, in
sys.exit(main())
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/init.py", line 215, in main
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/locale.py", line 581, in setlocale
return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting
root@97283:~#

Any idea what could be the reason?

Hardware (VPS) is:

description: Computer
width: 64 bits
capabilities: vsyscall64 vsyscall32
*-core
description: Motherboard
physical id: 0
*-memory
description: System memory
physical id: 0
size: 2GiB
*-cpu
product: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 v3 @ 1.90GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 1
bus info: cpu@0
width: 64 bits
capabilities: fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp x86-64 constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good eagerfpu xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf cpuid_faulting pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid dca sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm arat epb pln pts dtherm invpcid_single ssbd pti retpoline ibrs ibpb stibp tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid cqm xsaveopt cqm_llc cqm_occup_llc flush_l1d

Linux xxxxx 2.6.32-042stab134.8 #1 SMP Fri Dec 7 17:16:09 MSK 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux