18 August 2026
The Russian banking system and economy are beginning to experience a liquidity crisis. Depositors have already withdrawn more money from their accounts than in 2022, when panic gripped the country over the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, large businesses, fearing confiscations, economic instability due to Kremlin policies, and air strikes by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, are actively moving their funds abroad.
The budget deficit through July reached 6.46 trillion rubles, compared to a full-year forecast of 3.8 trillion rubles, and businesses are increasingly fearful of the confiscation of funds to finance the war. “If the government needs money, Putin will simply seize the assets. He doesn’t care. I think that’s exactly where things are heading,” a billionaire associate told The Washington Post. “This is not a place where you want to do business,” he added of Russia. “If there’s an opportunity to take money out, you do it.”
Moreover, “there is a feeling that political power is becoming less stable and it is better not to be here during such a period,” a former high-ranking financial official noted in a conversation with the newspaper.
Instability is being exacerbated by the expansion of attacks by Ukrainian drones and missiles. Initially, the Ukrainian Armed Forces primarily targeted energy infrastructure, including oil-exporting port terminals, refineries, oil storage facilities, and pipelines, as well as some defense enterprises. But in the last month, other businesses have also come under attack.
These primarily include Wildberries warehouses; according to Ukraine, the marketplace sells dual-use goods that could be used by the military. Over the past month, at least 22 Wildberries warehouses have been hit, 19 of which have suffered significant or complete fires, including the largest , in Kaledino, near Moscow. The total damage to the company and sellers whose goods were destroyed in its warehouses could reach approximately 800 billion rubles.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces also struck the space center in Samara (Russia is using the missiles it produces to deploy the Rassvet satellite constellation, which is being marketed as an analogue to the American Starlink and helps guide drones and missiles), grain terminals in Novorossiysk, and vessels in the Black and Azov Seas. This forced Fesco, one of Russia’s largest container carriers, to abandon its Black Sea routes and halted grain exports.
All of this costs billionaire businessmen a pretty penny, says a business associate of one of them: “They have to fork out. They’re not used to dealing with all these problems.”
This is one of the reasons why, one Moscow businessman told WaPo,
Everyone who can is trying to get money out of the country, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so.
According to this businessman and former financial official, one of the main channels for withdrawing funds amid tightened government restrictions has become the opening of brokerage accounts in neighboring Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. “From there, this money can be invested around the world,” the former financial official explained.
According to the Bank of Russia, the outflow exceeded $9.4 billion in the second quarter.
The withdrawal of funds by large companies, partly due to fear of possible confiscation, is exacerbating the country’s financial problems, says a former financial official. This is happening against the backdrop of a massive withdrawal of funds from bank accounts. The amount of cash in circulation from the beginning of the year to mid-August has increased by a cumulative 2.4 trillion rubles. This is more than in the first year of the war (2.2 trillion rubles), when the authorities were forced to impose draconian restrictions to curb the bank run after the invasion began.
According to Sberbank’s forecast, by the end of the year, the volume of cash in circulation could increase to 3.8 trillion rubles, which would be a historical record for Russia.
“Drones are flying, everything is burning, tension is rising,” and people are apparently instinctively keeping their money under their mattresses, “not in some bank where they might never get it back,” says a former financial official. For some banks, he says, this has proven to be a serious problem:
They didn’t expect this and invested all their “cash” somewhere else, and people come and withdraw half a trillion rubles a month.
This financial crisis in the mafia state keeps on snowballing. This raises the question, what will make the shithole collapse? A lack of money? A lack of fuel? Or the sudden death of the gutter rat?
A mixture of all three, hopefully.
Or some other Black Swan event. Anything. As long as the giant outhouse gets destroyed.
Typical! Instead of removing the problem that caused this war, they look after themselves.
Well, putinka wanted to return to the USSR and this takes a big step in that direction when people start hiding their money under their beds again.