The price isn't what you think it means. I say this only because I have a sizable amount of rubles from an earlier trade, and *I have no way to exchange them f

The price isn't what you think it means. I say this only because I have a sizable amount of rubles from an earlier trade, and *I have no way to exchange them for USD despite the exchange rate.* The price you see is a reflection of the price accepted by those able and willing to trade rubles which is currently *a limited subset of the world*. Sure, they have a massive trade surplus due to the commodity shortage, but a lot of the move is engineered through capital controls. (1) Western Ruble electronic trading is dead. It's near impossible to move rubles with any size. [https://www.risk.net/our-take/7946561/russian-ruble-trading-steps-back-in-time https://www.risk.net/our-take/7946561/russian-ruble-trading-...] (2) Moscow is forcing companies to buy rubles. (3) Moscow limited the amount of dollars that Russians could withdraw from foreign-currency bank accounts and barred banks from selling foreign currencies to customers. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-economy-is-tankingbut-the-ruble-is-soaring-11653559916 https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-economy-is-tankingbut-t...] (4) Moscow has fixed the price of gold. [https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-03-28/Russia-sets-fixed-gold-price-as-it-restarts-official-bullion-purchases.html https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-03-28/Russia-sets-fixed-gold...] So really, the "appreciation" you see is compensating you for the headache you'll have to go through to do anything meaningful with rubles. Meanwhile, Russian inflation is at 15% and GDP is collapsing. Russian imports have collapsed because *no one really wants rubles*.