City profile

Elvira Nabiullina

The Russian central bank governor, known for “sending coded messages with her attire”, chose “funereal black” as she warned, “ashen-faced”, of the devastating hit to the country’s economy from sanctions, said Richard Partington in The Observer. For Elvira Nabiullina, 58, the war “unpicks almost a decade of work going against the grain of Putin’s isolation” by opening up the Russian economy. When Western sanctions followed his invasion of Crimea in 2014, “she opposed capital controls” and floated the rouble on currency markets – part of a strategy of building a “fortress Russia” economy, less dependent on the US dollar. Seen as “competent, modest and honest”, she is “highly respected in the international community, including among some of Putin’s harshest critics”.

A lover of French poetry and opera, Nabiullina – an ethnic Tatar and one of Russia’s few senior female officials – has earned Putin’s trust through her “steely determination” to tough out economic shocks, said the FT. But sanctions freezing the central bank’s assets have severely limited her options. Apparently blindsided by the invasion – “Nabiullina ran through every kind of stress test, but not a war,” says a former top official – she has doubled interest rates to 20% and imposed capital controls to try to stabilise the situation. Colleagues say her priority is to protect Russian citizens – she thinks she can do the job better than anyone else. Still, her second five-year term will end in June. Russians will be studying Nabiullina’s “rotating collection of brooches” for clues even more closely than usual.