Russian Bank Bosses Earn More Than the Annual Budgets of 16 Entire Regions

Top management at Russia’s 15 largest banks received a staggering 63 billion rubles ($811.5 million) in total compensation for 2025, an amount that exceeds the entire annual budgets of 16 individual Russian regions, The Moscow Times reported on April 9, citing Russian state media.

Almost half of this massive payout—29 billion rubles ($373.5 million)—went directly to the leadership of Sberbank. Executives at the state-owned giant saw their compensation jump by 14.6% compared to last year and surge by 73% relative to 2023. As a result, Sberbank’s top brass took home more money in a single year than the entire budgets collected by impoverished regions like the Jewish Autonomous Oblast ($302.7 million) and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug ($370.9 million).

The combined 63 billion ruble ($811.5 million) payout across all 15 banks eclipses the budgets of 14 other regions as well, including Kalmykia, Ingushetia, Pskov, and Chukotka.

However, not all Russian financial institutions enjoyed the same windfall. Gazprombank, which historically serviced the massive export flows of the energy giant Gazprom, saw its profits plummet by 32% in 2025. Consequently, the bank slashed top management payouts by a third to 10 billion rubles ($128.8 million).

Similarly, Promsvyazbank (PSB), a key lender to the Russian defense sector, cut executive compensation from 1.7 billion ($21.8 million) to 1.1 billion rubles ($14.1 million). PSB was the only top-10 credit institution to end the year with a loss, dropping 19.2 billion rubles ($247.3 million) due to severe corporate non-payments that forced the bank to set aside 300 billion rubles ($3.86 billion) in reserves, according to The Moscow Times.

Despite the banking system finishing 2025 with a 3.5 trillion ruble profit ($45 billion), dark clouds are gathering over the Russian economy. Financial institutions are facing a tidal wave of credit defaults, with the volume of problem loans jumping by 1.9 trillion rubles ($24.4 billion) to reach a staggering 10.9 trillion ($140.4 billion).

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War in Ukraine

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Experts from the Kremlin-aligned CMASF analytical center warned in February that a “latent banking crisis” has effectively begun. According to Bloomberg sources, bankers began quietly sounding the alarm last summer as loan arrears spiked among major companies, specifically including defense factories struggling to repay over 20 trillion rubles ($257.6 billion) in loans allocated for military production.

The massive wealth disparity and brewing banking crisis inside Russia expose the deep, structural cracks forming under the weight of the Kremlin’s prolonged war economy. While top bankers pocket billions in bonuses, the real economy is struggling with crippling interest rates, Western sanctions, and a severe labor shortage.

The acute rise in problem loans—particularly within the defense sector, which relies heavily on state-owned lenders like Promsvyazbank—indicates that Moscow’s strategy of pouring trillions of rubles into military production is becoming financially unsustainable. As Ukrainian drone strikes continue to physically disrupt Russian energy exports and industrial hubs, the resulting loss of revenue threatens to turn this latent banking crisis into a full-scale economic crisis.

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