Sergei Glazyev

Sergei Glazyev is the Russian economist and counter-sanctions ideologue whose proposals for de-dollarised settlement, alternative currency arrangements and economic mobilisation supplied much of the intellectual programme that Russia's post-2014 sanctions insulation drew on, even where his specific schemes were rejected.

Role

An academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Glazyev served as presidential adviser from 2012 to 2019, with a brief covering Eurasian integration, and subsequently as the Eurasian Economic Commission's minister for integration and macroeconomics; in April 2025 he was appointed State Secretary of the Russia-Belarus Union State. He was among the first seven individuals the United States designated in March 2014 over Crimea, making him simultaneously a target and a theorist of the confrontation.

Doctrine

Glazyev's consistent argument is that dollar dependence is a strategic vulnerability the United States exploits at will, and that Russia's answer must be systemic: settlement in national currencies, an Eurasian Economic Union payment and eventually currency framework, gold-backed instruments, capital controls against outflow, and state-directed credit for mobilisation. After the 2017 US sanctions legislation he publicly urged treating the United States as an aggressor and liquidating Russian holdings of US assets. Mainstream Russian policymakers, notably the Bank of Russia under Elvira Nabiullina, rejected his monetary radicalism, and Connolly's study of Russia's sanctions response records how his mobilisation economics lost the internal argument to macroeconomic orthodoxy. Yet the post-2022 adaptation, SPFS, national-currency settlement with China and others, gold accumulation and the de-dollarisation agenda pressed through BRICS forums, adopted much of his direction of travel while discarding his instruments.

Significance

Glazyev matters as the clearest articulation of the target-state counter-doctrine: the belief that financial warfare is a permanent structural condition to be answered by exit from the attacker's system, not by negotiation within it. How far events vindicated him is contested; his supporters read the 2022 reserve freeze as proof of his warnings, his critics note that the parallel architecture he championed remains partial and costly.

See also

De-dollarisation as backlash dynamic · Fortress Russia (sanctions insulation doctrine) · Eurasian Economic Union · BRICS · SPFS · Bank of Russia · Elvira Nabiullina · Economic warfare · Economic statecraft

Sources

• Richard Connolly, Russia's Response to Sanctions: How Western Economic Statecraft is Reshaping Political Economy in Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• US Department of the Treasury, "Treasury Sanctions Russian Officials, Members of the Russian Leadership's Inner Circle, and an Entity for Involvement in the Situation in Ukraine" (20 March 2014).
• Eurasian Economic Commission, "SEEC approved new composition of Eurasian Economic Commission's Board" (26 December 2023).
• Standing Committee of the Union State, "Sergey Glazyev appointed Secretary of State of the Union State", appointment and official biography (21 April 2025; office checked 30 July 2026).