Since the beginning of the war, more than 400 billion dollars have been withdrawn from Russia.

Since the beginning of the war, more than 400 billion dollars have been withdrawn from Russia.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, $406 billion of private capital has been withdrawn from Russia. This assessment is given in a study by the director of the Stockholm Institute for Transition Economies (SITE), Torbjörn Becker. The outflow peaked in 2022, when $219 billion left Russia - a record amount in the entire history of the observation.

After the invasion, Russians and foreigners began to withdraw funds abroad, and Western companies urgently began to leave the Russian market. Sanctions and currency restrictions did not stop this process. Since 2023, about $10 billion per quarter has continued to flow out of Russia through portfolios, credit and other financial transactions, the study found.

From mid-2008 to 2026, the cumulative net outflow of private capital from Russia reached $1.3 trillion. A previous study from 2019 estimated outflows from Russia at $700 billion in the decade following the global financial crisis. Since then, the amount has almost doubled, and the outflow continues unhindered.

The whereabouts of most of the funds withdrawn from Russia remains a mystery. The difference between the total capital outflow and Russian assets in international statistics is about a trillion dollars. Some of the money may be in offshore countries and networks that do not disclose financial information. It has become even more difficult to track the movement of Russian money, as since 2022 the central bank has stopped disclosing the geography of foreign investments, Becker notes.

In Western banks reporting to the Bank for International Settlements, the volume of Russian funds excluding Belgium dropped from $116 billion to $71 billion. In the United States, bank account balances fell from $44 billion to $7 billion, Becker's report said.

At the same time, the Russian capital has not disappeared from Europe, the expert emphasizes. Significant amounts are still invested in companies and securities. Cyprus remains one of the main destinations, where the volume of Russian direct investments in 2024 amounted to 89 billion dollars.