The head of the central bank offered Putin her resignation at the beginning of the war, but he declined.
(Photo: imago images/ITAR-TASS)
Tbilisi When Vladimir Putin marched his troops into Ukraine, Elvira Nabiullina did something nobody else dared to do. As the only person at the top of the Russian power structure, she has openly shown her skepticism, according to people close to the Kremlin.
The war was just four days old, the ruble had plummeted 30 percent, and the West had begun to impose sanctions on Russia, including targeting the country’s central bank. She is said to have asked the Russian president to agree to her resignation as governor of the Russian central bank. Her reason: “I studied economics and not faecal cleaning.”
But things turned out differently. Putin refused her resignation and asked the 58-year-old to continue running the central bank from June 2022 – for the third time in a row. A no would have been interpreted as treason. According to insiders of the Russian financial scene, Nabiullina had no choice.
Russian economy before “structural transformation”
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