Deputy Governor of the Central Bank Sergei Belov has told Izvestia in an interview that the Bank has decided to abandon religious buildings altogether as images on banknotes:
"...when we changed the concept of banknote design and moved from the city series to the regional one (each banknote is now devoted to one of the federal districts), we decided at the same time to give up depicting objects of religious purpose."
In other words, roubles will no longer carry Orthodox symbols, which point to the key identity of the Russian people, Christianity.
In 2023, when the 1,000-rouble note acquired the image of a church with no cross on its dome, the Russian Orthodox Church judged that the new design "creates tension where there might be none". And now?
