Ukraine's 2014-15 currency crisis after Maidan and Crimea's annexation

From 1996 until February 2014, Ukraine kept the hryvnia almost continuously fixed against the US dollar, a policy the National Bank of Ukraine later came to see as having masked growing external imbalances rather than resolved them. The Maidan revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the start of fighting in the Donbas triggered capital flight and a collapse in confidence that the fixed rate could no longer withstand, and the central bank abandoned the peg in February 2014 in favor of a floating exchange rate. Over the following fourteen months the hryvnia fell from roughly 8 to the dollar to around 30 to the dollar, an almost threefold devaluation, while annual inflation hit 61% by April 2015. With an IMF program conditioning support on exchange-rate flexibility, the National Bank had limited scope to intervene directly in the market and instead relied on sharply higher policy rates and increasingly tight capital and foreign-exchange controls to stem the outflows. The National Bank has since described this period as the moment it moved decisively away from a fixed-rate anchor toward inflation targeting, a framework it credits with giving it the tools to manage the far larger shock of the 2022 invasion.