Экonomics in the Sanctions Era: Why Industry Needs a “Parallel” Financing Circuit

The experience of the pandemic is illustrative — in terms of its consequences, it was close to a special, sanctions-type period. The decline in business activity, together with a drop in payments for energy resources, nearly blocked enterprises’ investment programs. Back then, the situation was kept within a manageable framework, but extrapolating that experience to a scenario of protracted sanctions wars is unambiguous: without a special mechanism for uninterrupted financing, the sector risks facing a systemic collapse.

The study’s key idea is a separate circuit for the circulation of financial resources and an infrastructure for the movement of money and other instruments (bills of exchange, smart contracts, a parallel electronic currency) through channels partially or fully taken outside the conventional banking system. The circuit may be autonomous or linked to regular monetary circulation through “gateways.” It is designed to compensate for typical sanctions-period risks: delays in payments by energy sales companies, a decline in receipts from consumers, disruptions in budget financing, inflation spikes, shortages of components, and temporary failures of banking infrastructure.

The mechanism envisages the sector’s transition to a “settlement-year plan” — a financial plan based on current tariffs or indexed data from the previous period. If an enterprise’s settlements and banking services are disrupted, the state advances funds based on a forecast of economic activity, placing them in accounts at resilient banks, while final mutual settlements are carried out later. Logically, the guarantor would be the Ministry of Finance of Russia, with mirror guarantees from the parent companies of corporate groups.

A separate element is a consolidated industry-wide order for components, formed by federal authorities on import-substitution principles: enterprises and vetted suppliers conclude direct supply contracts bypassing standard procurement procedures, while coordinating agencies support execution and monitor the parties’ financial condition.

The study also shows how key sectors of the economy should change — transport, the fuel and energy complex, the agro-industrial complex, healthcare, communications, the financial sector, metallurgy, the forestry and chemical complexes, light industry, and trade. The general logic for all of them is to preserve the existing organizational structure while increasing resilience, ensuring the guaranteed provision of the needs of the state and the population, accelerating import substitution, and in parallel preparing programs for the “de-conservation” of technologies from the previous technological paradigm — readiness to return to simpler but proven solutions if high-tech imported supply chains become unavailable.

The practical conclusion is obvious: the system for managing industrial finance during a sanctions period cannot be built “on the fly” — it must be designed and tested in advance, while the economy is operating normally. It is precisely such a запас of institutional resilience that, according to the study conducted at the Financial University, will become the decisive factor in the stability of Russian industry under prolonged sanctions pressure.

Author: Associate Professor, Department of World Economy and World Finance, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation Ruslan Ozarnov.