The branch of the Russian VTB bank has four ATMs on the chic Ostozhenka Street in the center of Moscow, not far from the Kremlin. A blond boy with AirPods in his ears takes them all off on Sunday morning. In vain, the machines are empty.
Then an armored money truck drives up the sidewalk. A man in a dark blue uniform and a matching hat gets out, his colleagues remain in the car. But no matter how popular their rubles are, the bank is closed on Sundays. They can’t fill the vending machines. He calls his boss and walks back to his car. “There’s no point in waiting, try another location. We are also going to our next address.”
The US sanctions against the Russian banking sector announced last week caused a bank run in Russia. Several state-owned banks have been cut off from their assets and will be banned from the international payment system SWIFT by the US, Europe, UK, Japan and Canada. Russia’s VTB bank, together with Sberbank the largest Russian bank, was the hardest hit, with an immediate freeze of all assets. This makes the money inaccessible not only to the Kremlin, but also to the millions of customers of the bank. They can no longer transfer money to foreign accounts and can no longer buy things or plane tickets online.
crisis mode
“We have gone into crisis mode,” says Dutch entrepreneur Jeroen Ketting by telephone. Chain, who has been advising Dutch companies on the Russian market for thirty years, has international companies among his clients that no longer want to supply Russia for reasons of principle. “Russia is not such a strategic market that they cannot live without it.” According to Ketting, the dark times for Russia have only just begun, economically, politically and humanitarianly. The entrepreneur is pessimistic about his own professional future. “We will continue until the lights go out.”
Many Russians seem unaware of the magnitude of the war in Ukraine and its disastrous consequences for themselves. No wonder. State media speak of an “anti-terrorist” or “military” operation in Ukraine. Media watchdog Roskomnadzor banned independent media from using the words “attack”, “war” and “invasion”.
Also read:West pinches Russian central bank and banks. How far does this economic warfare go?
Yet the crisis is the talk of the day. In a restaurant in Moscow’s Gorky Park, bar workers discuss the sanctions. When asked about his future, the very young bartender grins sarcastically. “A lot of people don’t realize it yet, they think it doesn’t affect them. But we are now becoming just like North Korea.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 28, 2022