(Adnkronos) – Eyes are on the governor of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina. After missing – officially due to illness – the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where she was scheduled to participate in the main panel on macroeconomics, an absence that fueled questions about her disappearance from the public scene, Elvira Nabiullina is reported by her press office to be among the participants in the press conference scheduled for Friday after the periodic monetary policy meeting of the Central Bank’s Board of Directors. This marks two weeks of absence for the economist credited with the system’s resilience even after the start of the war against Ukraine in 2022 and the exponential increase in defense spending: in fact, despite divergences with the Kremlin on interest rates, the central bank raised them to 21 percent in 2024 to curb inflation, triggering a decline in GDP from 4.9 percent in 2023 to 1 percent last year. A former Minister of Economic Development, the economist is considered a moderate technocrat who, like other moderate establishment figures, nonetheless bowed to the Kremlin’s political positions after the start of the conflict, which, according to only Western sources, she initially criticized.
After her absence from the St. Petersburg Forum, where she was supposed to speak alongside Maksim Oreshkin, Kremlin economic advisor, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and Economic Development Minister Maksim Reshetnikov, the governor also ‘missed’ the conference of the National Association of Securities Market Participants (Naufor) on the 9th of this month, and a meeting with Putin to discuss inflation and interest rates the following day.
Nabiullina’s absence should not be the subject of “conspiracy theories,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov clarified. “Sometimes people get sick, there’s nothing wrong with that.” But the rumor circulating is that of her imminent resignation: she is in her third, and by law final, term as governor, which she first assumed in 2013 and which ends in June 2027. Last week, Vladimir Putin, who, much like Donald Trump, has always insisted on rate cuts to boost GDP, stated that there are grounds to expect another interest rate cut, currently at 14.5 percent, while still praising Nabiullina’s monetary policies, though she was not present at the meeting. “Inflation is falling, it’s just over 5 percent. So I think we have every right to expect a reduction in rates,” Putin declared. The last time Nabiullina was present at a public event was on May 28, alongside Putin during the Russian President’s visit to Kazakhstan.
