Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service says Moscow has broken a long-standing taboo and begun rapidly selling off its strategic gold reserves in order to plug budget holes and stabilise the ruble, signalling mounting pressure on Russia’s wartime finances. According to the intelligence assessment, for the first time in decades the Central Bank of Russia is not just accumulating bullion but has moved to direct sales from its own reserves on the domestic market, opening access to gold for commercial banks, state-owned companies and selected investment structures.

Until 2025, the pattern was the reverse: the central bank and the National Wealth Fund acted as buyers of gold, receiving metal from the Finance Ministry and Russian miners as a way to diversify away from Western currencies and shield reserves from sanctions risk. Now that flow has flipped. Ukrainian and independent media report that gold is being monetised explicitly to support the ruble, provide liquidity to large corporations under sanctions and cover growing budget deficits created by the war in Ukraine and falling hydrocarbon revenues.

The numbers from Russia’s own sovereign wealth fund help illustrate the scale of the shift. The National Wealth Fund’s stock of liquid assets has dropped from about 113.5 billion dollars in 2022 to roughly 51.6 billion dollars in 2025, a fall of more than half.Within that shrinking pool, gold holdings have been hit particularly hard. Before the full-scale invasion in 2022 the fund held 405.7 tonnes of gold; by November 2025 only 173.1 tonnes remained, meaning around 57 percent of its bullion – some 230 tonnes – has already been sold off, largely to finance wartime spending and compensate for lower oil and gas income.

Ukrainian intelligence estimates that the monetisation of gold is only just beginning. Its forecast suggests that in 2025 alone Russia could sell up to 30 billion dollars’ worth of gold, equivalent to roughly 230 tonnes at current prices, and in 2026 at least another 15 billion dollars, or about 115 tonnes.At that pace, a large part of the remaining high-quality, liquid gold stock within the wealth fund would be exhausted in just a couple of years, even before taking into account any additional bullion that may be drawn down from the central bank’s broader reserves.

The economic logic behind these sales is straightforward. After more than three years of full-scale war, Russia’s budget is under severe strain: military and security spending keeps rising, while revenues from oil and gas are squeezed by price caps, transport sanctions and growing caution among buyers in Asia.Recent US measures targeting Rosneft and Lukoil have further complicated exports, prompting NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to note that Putin is now considering unpopular tax hikes as sanctions bite. In that environment, gold functions as one of the few remaining “clean” assets fully under Moscow’s control, not frozen in Western jurisdictions and easily converted into foreign currency via intermediaries or domestic sales that free up other resources.

By selling gold to Russian banks and major companies, the central bank can inject liquidity into the financial system and indirectly obtain hard currency or yuan that can be used to intervene on the FX market and slow the ruble’s slide. Analysts quoted by Russian and Ukrainian outlets say this also helps to spread pressure across different parts of the reserve portfolio, taking some strain off yuan holdings and other sanctioned instruments. But this short-term relief comes at a long-term cost: every tonne of bullion sold is one less line of defence against future shocks.

Officially, Russia still reports sizeable overall foreign-exchange and gold reserves – about 734 billion dollars as of mid-November 2025, according to central bank data cited by Reuters.Reuters Yet a large part of that total consists of assets frozen in Western financial centres or held in forms that are difficult to mobilise without triggering new sanctions. That puts a premium on the liquid, sanction-proof portion of reserves, such as domestically stored gold and yuan balances in friendly jurisdictions. The rapid depletion of the National Wealth Fund’s gold, together with earlier drawdowns of its yuan holdings, suggests that this buffer is eroding much faster than the headline numbers imply.

For Ukrainian intelligence, this is precisely the point: it portrays the gold sell-off as evidence that Moscow is “eating away its strategic reserves” to keep the war economy afloat, rather than adjusting its policies. Western analysts are somewhat more cautious, noting that Russia still has room to borrow domestically, raise taxes and cut civilian spending, and that the central bank is trying to manage the process in a way that preserves some reserve diversification. At the same time, few dispute that burning through gold and rainy-day funds now will leave the Kremlin with less flexibility later, whether for defending the ruble in a deeper crisis, supporting banks in trouble or cushioning the economy against another external shock.

The Kremlin, for its part, has not disclosed the exact scale or pace of gold sales, and state media largely highlight record-high world gold prices – up nearly 60 percent in 2025 – as proof that holding bullion was a wise strategy.However, that price boom cuts both ways: it allows Moscow to raise more cash per tonne sold, but it also makes rebuilding reserves later significantly more expensive, especially if sanctions and war damage continue to weigh on export revenues.

Taken together, the new data point to a Russia that is still able to finance its war and stabilise its currency in the short term, but increasingly by running down the very reserves that were supposed to underpin its long-term financial stability. Gold, once treated as untouchable insurance against crises, is being turned into day-to-day cash. If the current trajectory of high war spending, tighter sanctions and heavy reserve drawdowns continues, the question will not be whether Moscow can keep the system going this year or next, but how much room it will have left to manoeuvre once the gold is gone.