On March 26, 2022, then United States President Joe Biden boasted in a speech in Poland that “unprecedented sanctions” targeting Russia that had been put in place over the last roughly 30 days had caused the ruble, Russia’s currency, to almost immediately be “reduced to rubble.”
Since then, the sanctions by the US and other countries, primarily in Europe, have been sustained and, indeed, much increased. Yet, the ruble has been in the years since far from the rubble Biden declared it had become.
On March 31, 2022, just five days after Biden made his ruble is rubble declaration, Kate Davidson wrote in a Politico article that the ruble that had had a big drop since the February 24, 2022 beginning of the Ukraine War had already had a big comeback so that “the ruble was nearly back to its prewar level.” And the ruble has since continued to demonstrate strength despite sanctions having ramped up much more. A Wednesday Bloomberg article relates that the Russian currency has “outpaced every major currency against the dollar this year” and is “within touching distance of levels seen before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago.”
New sanctions on Russia on top of old keep being imposed by the US and European Union. But, the ruble, far from being reduced to rubble, has been resilient.
