> If Russia's foreign reserves are stored in foreign banks, access to those reserves can also be limited via sanctions
All reserves not physically held are subject to sanctions. And the Russian central bank is being sanctioned by the U.S. and Europe.
I wonder why Russia didn’t dump its foreign reserves before invading Ukraine. I wonder how much more than $600 billion is Ukraine worth to Russia.
They expected their puppet government to be in place in under 72 hours.
Just a couple days ago it looked unlikely SWIFT would be involved. It's very possible Russia didn't expect magnitude of the sanctions being applied at all.
With US dollar reserves and gold being hard to use for Russia, I would think Russia and China will learn the value of self custody and self mining of cryptocurrency. The other alternative is to reinvest the money in real time inside their own borders: maybe build a few semiconductor fabs ?