You can easily buy cash in those small stores with surprisingly good exchange rates. Also I have converted my Rubels to Euros for months now on the stock market

You can easily buy cash in those small stores with surprisingly good exchange rates. Also I have converted my Rubels to Euros for months now on the stock market and sent them via Swift into an EU bank (in total above 10k€). So no problems there either. But the customs do question you rather aggressively about cash. Although he didn’t seem to believe me that I didn’t have cash with me, he didn’t search me either.