A Bloomberg story making the rounds this week points out that the value of Russia’s monetary gold reserves has increased by $216 billion since February 2022, offsetting much of the roughly $300 billion in Russian reserves Western countries are trying to steal.
RT takes a look inside the somewhat opaque world of Russia’s gold holdings.
What Russia’s gold reserves are – and what they are not
The headline gold reserve figure published by Russia’s central bank (CBR) does not actually include all the gold held by the Russian state. It refers to only those gold holdings that qualify as monetary gold under the IMF definition – meaning it must be held by the monetary authorities (rather than the state treasury) and must be used as a reserve asset. Regarding the latter point, under the official definition, reserves can only be deployed for balance-of-payments needs, to ensure confidence in the currency, and for safeguarding financial stability. Reserve assets are not used for funding the government.
This is an important distinction that is often overlooked when talking about a country’s reserve holdings (including gold).
Russia’s gold reserves are almost never sold (more on that below) and the CBR had long been adding to its stockpile. However, it stopped reporting gold transactions to the IMF in 2022 and now only discloses the gold stockpile, though with delays, and somewhat more opaquely.
How much gold does Russia´s central bank have – and why is it so much more valuable now?
The CBR has reported a relatively stable volume of gold since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. On March 1, 2022, it reported holding 73.9 million ounces. Nearly four years later, on January 1 of this year, that figure had inched up to 74.8 million (roughly 2,300 tonnes).
Most months see no official changes to the reported volume of gold held. It’s the value of that relatively unchanging stock that has been eye-catching.
The gold price ended the month of February 2022 at around $1,900/oz. As of Wednesday of this week, gold was trading at just over $4,860/oz. Therein lies the enormous gain in the value of Russia’s reserves pointed out in the Bloomberg article. The gold price soared by nearly 70% in 2025 alone.
Has Russia been adding to its gold reserves?
When Western sanctions were introduced in 2014 in response to Crimea, the CBR began boosting its holdings of gold and yuan and reducing dollar assets. Between 2013 and 2021, Russia’s dollar holdings fell fourfold while gold increased to a fifth of overall reserves. Although Russia mostly stopped adding to the volume of official reserves in recent years, thanks to the price surge, bullion now represents 43% of the country’s reserves. Officially, Russia is the fifth largest holder of gold reserves in the world.
What other gold the Russian state has besides official reserves
Russia has two other gold buckets: the National Wealth Fund (NWF, essentially a sovereign wealth fund) and Gosfund (a state repository of precious metals). Both are overseen by the Finance Ministry – thus putting them on the fiscal side and not on the monetary side – and both have been acquiring and deploying gold over the past few years.
What the deal with the NWF’s gold is
The NWF is used to stabilize the budget – think of it as a ‘rainy-day fund’. In May 2021, the Russian government decreed that the composition of the fund be 60% yuan and 40% gold, thus removing all exposure to the dollar.
Russia reported roughly 400 tonnes of gold around the time the conflict escalated in 2022. That figure was down to around 173 tonnes as of the beginning of November of last year. The selling of this gold – which doesn’t actually involve any gold leaving the country – has helped the Finance Ministry cover budget deficits.
While the roughly 60% decrease in the NWF’s gold holdings may look worrying, it’s important to note that, first of all, this gold does not represent reserves given that this channel is specifically for fiscal stabilization; second, the rise in the gold price has largely offset the depletion in monetary terms.
It’s also important to understand the scale of these operations (several hundred tonnes) in light of Russia’s actual official CBR-held reserves, which come in at around 2,300 tonnes.
And what about Gosfund, the ‘gold shadow reserve’?
The third gold bucket, Gosfund, is the most opaque. It is funded by the Finance Ministry and buys its gold domestically for strategic and discretionary purposes. The bullion at Gosfund can be thought of as a gold shadow reserve.
Gosfund’s gold holdings are not disclosed but are believed to be sizable – meaning Russia’s actual buffer is almost certainly larger than is reported. Some analysts believe that Gosfund has actually acquired more gold than the CBR since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
In any discussion of Gosfund, it is important to note Russia’s position as the world’s second largest gold producer, at over 300 tonnes per year.
Are reported global gold figures generally reliable?
Not entirely, but in the sense that gold reserves tend to be structurally understated. Strategic gold buying has become notoriously opaque across the world in recent years.
A Financial Times article from November, citing World Gold Council data, estimated that in the most recent quarter only about a third of official (as opposed to private-sector) buying was publicly reported to the IMF. Central banks have various reasons for concealing the true extent of their buying. One particularly sensitive reason is to avoid showing the extent of their diminished confidence in the dollar.
So why did the CBR recently sell gold?
Last November, it was reported that the CBR had carried out a sale of gold from its reserves. At first glance, this was an unusual step and it led to certain less-than-neutral outlets claiming that Russia was “selling off its strategic reserves.” But the logic is as follows. When assets are sold from the NWF (either yuan for gold) to obtain rubles for the budget, the central bank mirrors that operation by doing an equivalent transaction in the domestic market.
Think of it as sterilization – but with yuan or gold. Usually this has been done with yuan, but because the domestic gold market has grown large and liquid, gold can now be used alongside yuan for these operations. This also makes sense because selling yuan (for rubles) could risk strengthening the ruble more than would be comfortable for the budget.
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The operations to offset NWF transactions are carried out inside Russia and would not represent a material erosion of Russia’s gold holdings. In other words, Russia is not dumping gold abroad to raise money for the budget.
So has Russia made up most of what the EU is trying to steal?
Essentially, yes – but with a caveat. The increased value of Russia’s gold has indeed made up for most of the reserves frozen by the West, which are subject to a bitter and divisive dispute in the EU. The caveat is that the sanctions on Russia make the central bank’s gold holdings relatively illiquid. It would not be easy, for example, for the CBR to make a large gold sale to Asia. Of course, given that the funds frozen in the West are currently completely illiquid, even limited liquidity already increases Russia’s flexibility.
On the whole, the rising value of Russia’s already robust gold holdings is a strong indicator of the resilience of Russia’s reserves.
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