The governor of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, tried to resign after Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine. According to the Bloomberg agency, it was actually the Russian President himself who ordered her to stay there. According to qualified sources, at that point the resignation would have been seen as an outright betrayal of the Russian President, with whom Nabiullna has worked very closely for the past twenty years. After nine years in office, the governor was confirmed for another five years just last week. And she faces a time that is far from easy, as the war started by the Kremlin threatens to undo all her work in the nine years of her tenure. The governor is held in high regard among currency experts around the world, but her position has become drastically complicated after all Western countries imposed tough sanctions on Moscow while foreign companies shut down all their businesses in Russia.
Bloomberg quotes a former senior Bank of Russia official, Oleg Vyugin, who has known Nabiullina for years: “As long as there is an escalation, the central bank can only adapt to shocks.” Adjustments have ranged from the substantial doubling of interest rates to the effectively freezing capital abroad in order to prevent capital flight. The sanctions also froze around half of Russia’s $643 billion in reserves, prompting the central bank to avoid direct intervention to defend the ruble. Putin himself managed to increase the currency, having demanded payments from European countries for gas only in rubles. While the currency has recovered, it is still a long way from reaching preUkraine levels, also a goal of Nabiullina’s work.
