This is mentioned in the article. It was local debt, not foreign. During Russia’s financial crisis and ruble collapse of 1998, President Boris Yeltsin’s go

This is mentioned in the article. It was local debt, not foreign. During Russia’s financial crisis and ruble collapse of 1998, President Boris Yeltsin’s government defaulted on $40 billion of its local debt. The last time Russia fell into default vis-a-vis its foreign creditors was more than a century ago, when the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin repudiated the nation’s staggering Czarist-era debt load in 1918.