The third and last term of CBR governor Elvira Nabiullina expires on June 24, 2027 and the list of possible replacements is short, The Bell reports, based on sources in the Kremlin.

Under current law, this will have to be veteran central banker Nabiullina’s last and Vladimir Putin must submit a nomination to the State Duma no later than three months before that date.

Nabiullina has seen Russia through multiple crises, since before she took over the job of running the regulator in 2013, as part of an elite team financial and economic team that came up under the tutelage of former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. He once won The Banker's accolade of “Best central banker in the world”  and successfully steered Russia’s economy through much of the madness in the 1990s and was the father of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, or National Welfare Fund (NWF), that has cushioned many of the shocks the economy received in the subsequent years. Today he remains the intellectual force behind Russia's grand "National Projects" reform programme to transform the Russia into a modern economy. 

Once in charge of the central bank, Nabiullina launched a long-overdue multiyear clean up of the banking sector, closing hundreds of dodgy “bank-like” institutions that were little more than money laundering chutes to whisk profits out of Russia. That campaign came to a head in 2017 when she closed half a dozen of the so-called “Garden Ring banks” – some of the biggest commercial banks under the control of leading oligarchs, which nearly sparked a systemic meltdown, but left the sector largely clean and healthy after the campaign ended.

She also saw Russia through the shock of the 2008 global financial meltdown that also nearly brought Russia to its knees. Then did the same during the currency crisis of 2014-15 but took a brave decision to free the ruble from its exchange rate corridor early. A scary few months followed as the ruble collapsed in value, but the move preserved the country's hard currency reserves and the exchange rate volatility eventually absorbed most of the shock.

And under her lead Russia built up massive hard currency reserves reaching $600bn on the eve of the Ukrainian invasion, with a large share of that in gold, and at the same time paid down Russia’s external debt from over 50% of GDP at the start of her tenure to 18% now. Those moves have made the Russian economy largely sanction proof.

Even after the war in Ukraine started, she moved adroitly and unusually aggressively with a massive 1000bp rate hike in the first week after the invasion and slapped strict capital controls on the market not seen since the 1990s to rapidly stabilise the economy from the shock of war. While Ukraine’s Western allies were hoping the Russian economy would collapse under extreme sanctions, instead it quickly rebounded and went on to be the strongest growing major economy in the world over the next two years.

More recently she has had to battle against persistent high inflation and has kept interest rates crushingly high, but in an unorthodox experiment, she has artificially slowed growth to pull inflation down that is working, albeit at great pain to companies and the people. She has won a reputation as the most conservative central banker in the world and proven herself to be exceptionally good at her job.

With roughly a year left on the clock, now the question of who can take over is being discussed — but only barely. No name is being floated in either official or unofficial circles, a senior government official told The Bell. "Nabiullina herself is operating on the assumption that she serves out her term with no extension," a person close to her said.

That assumption may prove correct. Or it may not. In Moscow, the law has a way of accommodating necessity and the law governing her term limits is a simple federal law that would be easy to amend.

The short list that nobody is officially compiling

Despite the official silence, bankers and officials are quietly circulating three names as plausible candidates for the post — a shortlist assembled more by process of elimination and institutional logic than by any active campaign.

The first name on the list is Maxim Oreshkin, deputy head of the presidential administration and a former economy minister who has long been considered a candidate for major economic posts. He has been a key economic advisor to president Vladimir Putin and importantly has his trust on economic matters. Together with Kudrin, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, and Nabiullina herself, Oreshkin is a key member of the macro-economic team that actually runs the bulk of Russia’s economy.

However, according to insiders, which Oreshkin would have liked the job once upon a time, he now has his eyes on the post of Prime Minister. "He used to want it, but apparently not anymore — he's comfortable where he is in the Kremlin," a federal official told The Bell.

The second name is Pyotr Fradkov, chief executive of Promsvyazbank (PSB), and the son of Putin’s earlier unremarkable choice of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. PSB used to be a leading commercial bank, but was one of those purged during Nabiullina’s 2018 purge and has since been taken over by the state as the leading lender and financial backbone of Russia's defence industry.

Fradkov’s pedigree adds a certain dynastic logic. But the conversations, such as they are, remain preliminary. "His name probably came up because PSB has become one of the most important banks in the country. But there are no real conversations happening," a source told The Bell.

The third candidate is Andrei Kostin, the long-serving chairman of VTB, Russia's second-largest bank. Like Oreshkin, Kostin is said to have limited enthusiasm for the role. He is older and a product of the Soviet Gosbank system, having taken over Vnesheconombank (VEB) under Boris Yeltsin, the state agency for Russia’s sovereign bonds, which he transformed into a success commercial bank, before moving to VTB, another legacy Soviet bank for external trade. Kostin is more of a politician than a banker, but the size and market power of VTB has made it a highly profitable institution.

A source familiar with the discussions offered a crisp summary of the field: "Kostin doesn't like the idea — he's fine where he is. Oreshkin would rather be prime minister. Fradkov would agree to anything. Nabiullina wants out, but her feelings are mixed."

The fourth scenario

None of the three names has generated anything resembling momentum — which brings the discussion back, inevitably, to the fourth option: Nabiullina stays.

Russia is still at war. The economy is in a mess and hurting. A banking or funding crisis is not impossible. And navigating a soft-landing of a financial system badly distorted by wartime pressures is not a small task. The arguments for keeping Nabiullina on are strong.

Her tenure has been, by most external assessments, one of the most consequential in the Bank of Russia's post-Soviet history. The legal obstacle to a fourth term is real but not insurmountable. The Central Bank Law — Federal Law No. 86-FZ — is ordinary federal legislation, not a constitutional statute, and the procedural bar to amending it is low. "The law can always be changed," two federal officials told The Bell with confidence.

But the most important factor is Putin wants a safe pair of hands. One of Putin’s strengths is that he understands that he does not understand finance and economics and has sought out and put in place a team of professionals with a proven track record. "He trusts her enormously," a person close to Nabiullina said of Putin. That trust, sources suggest, is not merely personal. Keeping an ostensibly independent central bank governor in place also serves a political function: when powerful business allies lobby for cheaper credit, Putin can always tell them to take it up with her first. Kudrin once put it clearly: “Imagine, we have over $600bn in hard currency reserves and a rapacious Duma, and yet the central bank has managed to keep all that money ring fenced and off limits for all these years.”

The absence of any public succession discussion one year out is itself informative. In a system where major appointments are prepared carefully and well in advance, the vacuum either reflects genuine uncertainty at the top — or a deliberate decision to keep options open for as long as possible, The Bell speculated in a commentary.

“Nabiullina, now 61, has navigated extraordinary pressures since 2022, presiding over an economy that has defied many western predictions of collapse while privately managing the contradictions between orthodox monetary policy and the demands of a war economy running at full throttle. Whether she leaves on schedule in June 2027, stays on under amended legislation, or is replaced by one of the names currently circulating in Moscow's unofficial networks remains, for now, a matter for a single decision-maker.”