Decree 706 of 29 September, published on the state legal portal the same day, rewrites point 1 of Decree 193 of 25 March, the instrument that set a special procedure for taking cash roubles and refined gold bars out of Russia, and it took effect on signature. The new text names 7 destinations: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the other members of the Eurasian Economic Union, plus Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The limit for a person falls from the equivalent of $100,000 to about $12,000; the limit for a company falls to zero.
Three exceptions apply to both. Cash may leave through international airports that the government will designate, if every rouble is covered by bank statements certified by the issuing bank, showing it was withdrawn from an account of the person or company carrying it, or by other documents on a list the government has yet to publish. Carriers may take roubles through when both the origin and the destination lie outside Russia and the cash is shown to have entered Russia first, and the foreign ministry may clear cash for embassies, consulates and missions abroad.
The limit for a person falls from the equivalent of $100,000 to about $12,000; the limit for a company falls to zero.
Enforcement is written on the same page. Cash above 1 million roubles is confiscated from a traveller; a company’s or a sole trader’s cash is confiscated in full. The interior ministry, the FSB and the customs service are instructed to see the decree applied, and the government has 3 months, with the central bank, to approve a procedure for recording the cash that leaves.
The previous ceiling was 6 months old. From 1 April the March decree had let a traveller take out the equivalent of $100,000, Kazinform and Asia-Plus recalled on Tuesday; the Tashkent business site Spot converts the new limit to $11,840. Georgia, Mongolia and Turkmenistan are outside the list.
How much cash crosses these borders above 1 million roubles a head, no published statistic says. The flows the ceiling touches are known by their size: remittances to Kyrgyzstan were $279.5 million in July, 12% below a year earlier, with Russia the source of 9 dollars in every 10, and Russian suppliers were owed 52.3 billion roubles by Kyrgyz buyers in June on Rosstat’s count, the trade credit behind the re-export boom. What the decree does to both is move the legal channel from the suitcase to the account: the airport exception itself is written around a bank statement.
A second clock runs on the same money in Washington. Section 103 of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, signed on 18 September, obliges the president within 30 days to sanction any foreign bank that engages in significant transactions with Sberbank, VTB, Gazprombank or any other Russian state-owned bank, unless the Treasury secretary finds the sanction against the interests of the United States. That deadline is 18 October; by then the region’s banks will know what Washington counts as significant and whether the Treasury uses its exception.
Unresolved: the list of airports and documents the government must publish; whether foreign currency, which the decree does not mention, keeps the old rules; how the central bank’s accounting procedure will treat cash that leaves under the airport exception; and the reaction in the 7 capitals. By Wednesday morning Astana had said nothing: the government’s news index and Kazinform’s front, which carried the decree at 05:21 as a wire item, carried no official comment.