National Bank of Ukraine to ditch calculating hryvnia-ruble exchange rates
Source: National Bank of Ukraine
Ruble no more? The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) said on Wendesday it will stop calculating the official exchange rate of the Ukrainian hryvnia against the Russian ruble, along with the Belarusian ruble and the Iranian rial.
Presently, Ukraine uses two lists of currencies for calculating the official exchange rate: a daily list covering 33 currencies and a monthly list of 24. The NBU plans to merge these two lists into a single daily basket that will include the currencies from the top group of the international classifier and those used by countries with which Ukraine has at least 95% of its trade turnover.
The updated basket will feature only 44 currencies. It will not list currencies of Russia, Belarus, Algeria, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Armenia, and several other countries.
The NBU will review the list of currencies every three years if trade volumes with the listed countries fall below 90%.
It’s important to note that since February 24, 2022, the National Bank of Ukraine outlawed any financial operations with Russian and Belarusian rubles. However, in November 2023, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada made an exception for cashless transactions involving the sale of rubles.
Earlier this year, the NBU allowed banks to temporarily conduct sales of Russian and Belarusian rubles from customer accounts, with the permission valid until the end of December 2024.
In 2025, the deadliest year yet for civilians, Ukraine’s three largest charitable foundations raised a record 105.9 billion hryvnias. It is more than the years 2022–2024 combined. According to the UN, humanitarian aid in Ukraine was delivered by more than 450 organisations, reaching five million people over the course of the year. Civic foundations hold licences to purchase lethal weapons, which is a function states have monopolised for centuries. These record sums were underwritten by international government grants, which means foreign states now channel billions directly through Ukrainian civic funds, bypassing inter-state channels. It is hard to imagine a stronger institutional trust in civil society.
During the GLOBSEC Defence Forum 2026 in Prague, representatives of “Steel Front”, an initiative by Rinat Akhmetov, discussed with NATO delegations, military officials, and representatives of the European defense industry the lessons learned from Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.
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