It is "premature" to talk about lifting sanctions on Russia and the return of international payment systems Visa and Mastercard to the country, stated the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina. According to her, she is not involved in negotiations regarding the lifting of restrictions, and payment systems have not yet "approached" the Central Bank with a question about resuming operations in the Russian market. Nabiullina also noted that the financial regulator will not yet factor in the end of the war in Ukraine in its baseline forecast.
"We update our forecasts four times a year depending on the information that becomes available. <…> For now, we consider it premature to include the possible consequences of the settlement (of the military conflict) in the baseline forecast. We will see how the situation develops," said the head of the Central Bank.
At the same time, she promised to continue discussions with the government on mechanisms for the return of Russian assets frozen abroad. In particular, Nabiullina called the freezing of private investors' assets, who were not subject to sanctions, "absolutely unfair." Last year, according to her, authorities managed to unblock about 570 billion rubles in securities and coupon payments belonging to 1.5 million Russian investors.
Visa and MasterCard announced their exit from Russia in the spring of 2022 due to the Russian army's invasion of Ukraine. After that, Russians began to massively obtain bank cards from countries in the CIS to maintain the ability to make payments abroad, including within the EU. One of the key destinations for this "card tourism" became Kazakhstan, where, since 2022, there has been a surge in demand for local bank cards from Russian citizens. In just June–July 2022, 50.7% of the annual volume of plastic card issuance in the country was issued to Russian citizens.
