By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
On Friday (June 19), the Governor of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), Elvira Nabiullina, returned from a three-week silence and absence from office that was due, she claimed, to a “cold” and the “loss of my voice”.
The anti-Russia propaganda platform, Financial Times of London, reported three people in the know as calling her ailment “a severe respiratory infection”. There is a deeper malaise, the newspaper added – Nabiullina is fighting on one side of the Kremlin “splits over how to manage the strains in Vladimir Putin’s wartime economy.”
Tass, RT, Sputnik, and other Russian state media have omitted to report Nabiullina’s ailment and the Kremlin malaise.
According to four people in the know, Nabiullina has been telling Putin that she opposes increased state budget spending on fighting the war to a conclusion on Russian terms; and that at the CBR she will continue to keep up the key interest rate in order to lower inflation and cut the budget deficit.
Whether she threatened to resign ahead of term next June if Putin did not allow her to get her way is not known for certain.
Against Nabiullina’s faction of anti-war advisers, which includes the Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and the special negotiator with the Trump White House, Kirill Dmitriev, there are the majority of the Security Council; the General Staff and its intelligence chief, Admiral Igor Kostyukov; and the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. They have repeatedly and publicly signaled their advice to Putin to escalate on the battlefield with “systemic and consistent” attacks because the trust-in-Trump (TiT) line has failed to deliver an end-of-war settlement guaranteeing Russian security.
Both Medvedev and Lavrov have publicly declared that Trump’s August 2025 “Anchorage formula” for the security guarantee has proved to be empty deceit. “It’s time to openly declare that there are no more rules regarding neo-Nazi Kiev and there can’t be any”, Medvedev has reportedly declared. “Everything now depends not on negotiations but on what our frontline heroes are doing,” Lavrov announced on June 8.
Yury Ushakov, the president’s spokesman for the trust-in-Trump line, announced on Sunday (June 21): “Russia does not expect the implementation of the agreements reached in Anchorage, but counts on the victory and the implementation of its own goals…Only one of the parties [Putin] adheres to the agreements today. Another [Trump] was not quite able to go through his part.”
At the same time as Putin authorized Ushakov to issue this signal, he also authorized Nabiullina to give a contradictory one.
At a meeting of government ministers in Nabiullina’s absence on June 10, Putin had claimed: “Overall, the [domestic economic] situation is under control – that much is quite obvious. And the measures we have taken are yielding the expected results. In fact, the inflation rate has declined. Where are we at this point? It is slightly over five percent. Therefore, I believe that we can expect a lower key interest rate and to be able to achieve other key indicators.”
That was the marching order for Nabiullina to lower the CBR’s key rate. But then on Friday (June 19) she announced the smallest possible reduction in the rate – twenty-five basis points – and threatened to raise it again between now and the national parliamentary election on September 18-20.
“On 19 June 2026, the Bank of Russia Board of Directors decided to cut the key rate by 25 basis points to 14.25% per annum,” Nabiullina’s press office said. “The underlying price growth has edged down but remains generally in the range of 4–5% in annualised terms…Lending growth has accelerated in recent months. Fiscal policy over the three-year horizon will be more accommodative than previously expected. This may require a higher key rate path than assumed in the April baseline scenario.”
By “accommodative” Nabiullina meant to rebuke Putin for refusing to cut the war budget or social welfare spending during the election campaign.
Nabiullina repeated for the press the threat that she might not take the President’s orders in the future. “I would like to emphasise that neither a further key rate cut nor the size of it is predetermined at any particular meeting. We might need to take pauses to analyse all incoming information and the effect of our earlier decisions. It is only by maintaining a balanced approach, especially amid high uncertainty.”
This was her riposte to Putin’s announcement of the week before that he wants an increase in government spending and therefore an increase in the budget deficit. “Mr Siluanov talked about the budget,” Putin said. ”It goes without saying that we must launch a new investment cycle taking into consideration present-day reality, as well as the proposals we have just heard from the business community. I think that this much is obvious.”
The clash between the factions over the CBR’s key rate has been public in Moscow for months (years ). Not quite public, but not secret, is Nabiullina’s attempts to manipulate both monetary and fiscal policy to bring the Ukraine war to an end on the US and NATO terms.
Still hidden, however, is Nabiullina’s attempt to sabotage Russian military and financial assistance to Iran in the war against the US and Israel.
Last week, the Iranian Central Bank Governor, Abdolnasser Hemmati, was in Moscow with a delegation of experts to discuss measures to protect rouble-rial reserves and trade payments from US and European sanctions, and to enable a substantial increase in Russian financial assistance to the embattled government in Teheran. That assistance now includes a Russian loan of up to $20 billion in roubles.
The agenda for these negotiations was announced in the Iranian and Turkish state media; they have followed up with detailed reports of the outcomes agreed so far.
In contrast, the CBR press office has imposed a blackout on the meetings; the Russian media have remained silent. Asked to confirm which CBR officials Hemmati met last week in Moscow, and what they have agreed to do, Nabiullina’s press spokesman refused to answer.
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