Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday attacked sanctions that Westerners called an “empire of lies” in response to the Ukrainian aggression, and announced drastic measures to stem the ruble’s collapse.
Read more: What is the economic impact of sanctions in Russia and the world?
According to a decree published on the Kremlin website, residents of Russia will be banned from transferring money abroad from Tuesday. In addition to this first measure, Russian exporters will be obliged to convert 80% of their foreign currency earnings accrued from January 1 into rubles, as of today.
The ruble today hit a historic low since the start of trading on the Moscow Stock Exchange, and closed trading at 94.6 per dollar, compared to 83.5 before the invasion of Ukraine.
To protect the national economy and currency from the effects of Western sanctions, the Central Bank of Russia announced in a statement on Monday that it would raise its core interest rate by 10.5 percentage points to 20%.
The United States, the European Union and other countries have announced that they will exclude certain Russian banks from the SWIFT international bank payment system and from any transactions with the Central Bank of Russia. Commercial retaliatory measures were also announced, such as the closure of airspace for Russian aircraft across Europe.
Russian TV showed footage of a meeting between Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Russian Central Bank President Elvira Nabiullina and the director general of the country’s largest bank, Sberbank, to respond. Healthy only.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov previously acknowledged that Western powers’ sanctions were “drastic” and a “problem”, but that Russia had “all the capabilities necessary to make up for the losses”. The Kremlin has not announced any additional measures in response to the sanctions.
“The measures reduce volatility,” said AFP Alexei Vedev, an analyst at the economic institute Ghadar. “The uncertainty is huge and the central bank is acting with reason,” he said.
worried tycoon
In a rare reaction, the Russian tycoon publicly expressed his displeasure. “This is a real crisis and real crisis experts are needed. We must completely change economic policy and end all this state capitalism,” said Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire maker of aluminum giant Rusal, on the messaging app Telegram. Wrote. He said he expected “clarification and clear comments on economic policy for the next three months” from the government.
There is still room for the Open Broker, Russia’s macroeconomic advisor Serguy Khestanov. “As long as there are no real sanctions on Russian exports, especially oil and gas, there will be no catastrophe,” he said, although “people will certainly feel the impact”.
Concerned, Some Russians prefer to withdraw their savings from the bank, Such was the case of 58-year-old Svetlana Paramonova, who wants to withdraw all her money “to keep at home”. It’s safe, because now we don’t understand what happens.
