Putin Hit With Humiliating New Crisis as Russians Pull Billions From Banks

Russians are pulling billions from their bank accounts over fears that Vladimir Putin could grab their money to fund his increasingly attritional war with Ukraine.

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The tide of the war has turned lately, with a Ukrainian counter-offensive reaching deep inside Russia, targeting commerce and energy infrastructure.

According to Sberbank senior executive Taras Skvortsov, total capital flight this year could reach double the amount drained during the initial wave after the 2022 invasion.

The relentless exodus is triggering severe liquidity shortages across a banking sector already teetering under mounting bad debts, forced to finance a state-directed, wartime lending spree to feed the Kremlin’s military machine.

“Drones are flying. Things are burning down. Nervousness is growing. And people’s everyday wisdom may be kicking in that they need to have cash under their pillow and not somewhere in banks where it may never be returned,” a former finance official told the Washington Post.

“For some banks this really is a problem. They didn’t expect this, and they invested all the cash elsewhere, and yet people are coming and taking out half a trillion rubles [$5.9 billion] a month.”

Big businesses are squeamish, too. Fresh Central Bank figures reveal a staggering capital outflow, with more than $9.4 billion transferred out of Russia in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

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The exodus is making it much harder for the Russian government to borrow money to fund its war. Russia’s Finance Ministry relies heavily on selling state bonds to cover a growing budget deficit caused by sky-high military spending and a stalling economy, but last month it was forced to cancel planned bond sales altogether because the cash simply wasn’t there.

A war of attrition would mean an increasingly unstable strain on the Russian economy.

“If the government needs cash, Putin will just do a grab for assets. He doesn’t care,” an associate of one Russian billionaire told the Post. “And that’s where I think it’s heading.”

The former finance official agreed that a pervasive feeling in Russia is “that political power is becoming not quite as stable.”

The problem for Putin is compounded by Ukrainian strikes on big business. Ukraine launched an armada of drones at Russia on Sunday that set fire to yet another Wildberries facility and killed six people.

Referred to as Russia’s equivalent to U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon, Wildberries has become a consistent target of Kyiv and is thought to have now had billions of dollars worth of merchandise destroyed in drone strikes across the country.