Menu Icon A vertical stack of three evenly spaced horizontal lines. All the economic and production goals that you have set yourselves, russian foreign exchange reserves country has the currency resources to achieve them,” he said.

That’s been Vladamir Putin’s bet this year. According to Bloomberg, the Russian president asked his advisors at the beginning of the year if the country could withstand the economic shock of invading Ukraine, and they said yes. But a currency reserve shouldn’t be measured just by how big it is. As the ruble crisis continues this week, there are actually two key questions: Does Russia have enough reserves?

The second question is: are those reserves liquid enough to be used if they need to be? The level of reserves is a sacred figure for Putin,” former Kremlin advisor Gleb Pavlovsky told Bloomberg. Now the reserves are rapidly dwindling again. The question is how much of the remaining chunk would actually be available if the Russians need to access it immediately. The Economist took a crack at estimating the liquidity for the country’s foreign reserves last week. In other words, much of these funds are illiquid. They can’t just be withdrawn like how one takes money out of an ATM machine.