Elvira Nabiullina, Head of the Central Bank, Is Guiding Russia’s Economy

“She is trusted by the government and the president,” said Sophia Donets, an economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow, who worked for the Central Bank from 2007 to 2019. She added that in the financial sector she was delegated to the central bank.

This confidence was built while Ms. Nabiullina was strengthening Russia’s economy against Western sanctions, especially from a long range of American penalties. In 2014, the United States separated many major Russian companies from the capital markets. However, these companies have large amounts of foreign currency-denominated debt and are wary of how to repay their debt.

Nabiullina set out to squeeze as much US dollars out of the economy as possible so that businesses and banks wouldn’t become more vulnerable if Washington further restricted access to the country’s use of the dollar.

She also shifted bank reserves, valued at over $ 600 billion, to gold, the euro and the Chinese yuan. Nabiullina told Congress last month that the dollar’s share of her reserves fell from more than 40% to about 11% during her tenure. She told lawmakers that the country has “sufficient” reserves in gold and yuan, even after sanctions freeze banks’ overseas reserves.

Other protections against sanctions included an alternative to the recently developed global banking messaging system SWIFT. Banks have also changed their payment infrastructure to handle credit card transactions domestically, so even the termination of Visa and Mastercard had minimal effect.

March, Bloomberg News When The Wall Street JournalCited an unknown source and reported that Nabiullina attempted to resign after the invasion of Ukraine and was rejected by Putin. The central bank rejected those reports.

last month, Government of Canada He put her under sanctions as “a close companion to the Russian government.”