• Russians have found a new way to withdraw capital and are sending $500 million a month to foreign brokers, according to Russian Central Bank data.
• Between December 2024 and June 2026, Russian households transferred nearly 600 billion rubles ($7.2 billion) to foreign brokerage accounts. This exceeded the total transfers recorded over the previous seven years combined.
• Meanwhile, banks in neighbouring Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan sharply raise fees for depositing cash Russian roubles held by nonresidents.

[Original in Russian, automated translation witih minimal edits.]

Russians are increasingly using accounts with foreign brokers to withdraw money from Russia. Such transfers have increased noticeably since the end of 2024. From December 2024 to June, Russian households sent almost 600 billion roubles to the accounts of non-resident brokers – more than in the seven years since the beginning of 2018, when the Central Bank started publishing this data. As can be seen from the regulator’s statistics. In April-June, these transfers amounted to 42.3-45.5 billion roubles, or more than $500 million per month.

A significant part of such transactions is the withdrawal of money from the country. Dmitry Isakov, the founder of the investment platform Lender Invest, estimated their share at about 40% of transfers to the accounts of non-resident brokers. Of these, according to his observations, three-quarters are so-called “parking solutions”, where a brokerage account is used as an alternative to a foreign currency bank account, and a quarter are related to “capital relocation” in case of moving or educating children abroad – in this case, the brokerage account acts as the first link in a future chain of transfers.

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This is forced by the tightening of sanctions and the tougher attitude towards Russian money in Western banks. Yulia Khandoshko, head of the European broker Mind Money, called “brokerage stories”, in essence, “quasi-banking operations”: this is not “substitution or manipulation”, but simply “a different format of work”. At the same time, it is much easier to open a brokerage account than a bank account, which has become a problem, especially after the EU blacklisted Russia at the end of last year as a country that does not combat money laundering effectively.

However, the tightening of the rules for working with Russian money also applies to brokers. One of Europe’s largest players, Scalable Capital, is notifying Russians that their accounts will soon be closed.

Russians often use brokers from the EAEU countries, primarily Kazakhstan and Armenia. Foreign brokers, primarily in the EAEU countries, have become the most accessible and convenient channel for transferring funds abroad, noted independent financial advisor Natalia Smirnova: through them, you can withdraw roubles from the Russian Federation to your account in the EAEU or even in Cyprus, and from there transfer them to a bank account in another country. At the same time, it should be understood that the receiving bank will ask for the source of the funds and may not accept such money, she stressed, “but this is more about crediting bank accounts in Europe”. She herself uses an account with a Cypriot broker to transfer roubles from the Russian Federation to the EU.

Russians also use foreign brokers for their intended purpose – for investment. Since the start of the war, the Russian stock market has fallen more often than it has risen: since the beginning of 2022, the Moscow Exchange index has lost more than 40%. In addition, foreign markets give investors the opportunity to diversify their portfolio by including securities from industries not represented on Russian exchanges and to reduce country risk. Before the war, this did not require an account with a foreign broker: shares of American, European, Chinese and other companies were easy to buy for roubles on the St. Petersburg and Moscow exchanges. These investments were frozen – in total, for more than 1.5 million people. The Central Bank does not disclose the value of these assets; at the end of 2022, it estimated it at almost a trillion roubles.

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Meanwhile, Banks in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan sharply raised fees for accepting cash rubles, as reported per the independent media outlet Meduza.

Banks in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan have sharply raised fees for depositing cash Russian rubles into accounts held by nonresidents, the Russian business news outlet RBC reported.

Fees that ran 2–5% at the start of summer have since climbed to 10–15% of the deposited amount at some banks, with Belarus’s Neo Bank Asia now charging a flat 20%.

At least 10 banks have tightened their terms since the beginning of August, according to the outlet’s review of their websites.

Fees for depositing Russian rubles at banks in neighboring countries first appeared in June amid a sharp influx of cash from Russia. A source at one of the Belarusian banks told RBC that the surge in cash flowing from Russia into Eurasian Economic Union countries stemmed from tighter controls on cash transactions inside Russia.

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