Ruble falls further, Russian officials seek to calm nerves

Speaking at the same forum, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina said that Russia’s financial stability did not appear to be at risk for now, and that the bank had a wide array of tools with which to address the effects of the sanctions, which she suggested would not be long-lasting.

“Friday’s events [the U.S. sanctions] are surely causing the market correction that we are now seeing. As usual in such cases, the market becomes volatile during first days,” Nabiullina said. “To our mind, some time is needed for the adaptation of the economy’s financial sector to the changed external conditions.”

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Russian authorities “will implement all the required tools to mitigate the effects of the new sanctions and any other external events with potentially [adverse effects] on businesses and the financial market.”

The sanctions freeze any assets that those targeted have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them.

The Russians added to U.S. sanctions lists included some of the most prominent officials and magnates to be targeted by the United States in its efforts to punish Moscow for actions including its alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

They include well-connected tycoon Oleg Deripaska, whose companies suffered sharp losses on April 6, as well as state-controlled gas giant Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, National Guard chief and former Putin bodyguard Viktor Zolotov, and the secretary of Putin’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev.

The new sanctions come less than one month after Putin won a six-year fourth presidential term in a landslide vote that emphasized his dominance of the country.

He has vowed to improve living conditions and will be under pressure to keep the economy — which is forecast to grow by 2 percent in 2018 after emerging from a two-year recession and growing by 1.5 percent in 2017 — from flagging.

The Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported on April 10 that the government is considering setting up offshore-style zones in the Western exclave of Kaliningrad and the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok in an effort to shelter the tycoons hit by the U.S. sanctions and return Russian capital to the country.

This article is published courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty