With further state support, possibly even full nationalisation, it is likely to survive within the confines of Russia’s borders. Yet, it is a serious first scalp for the West, and, as a symbol of the price of Putin’s illegal war, hugely powerful. 

One in every two Russian businesses has a Sberbank account, as do 140m Russians. Overseas expansion was a source of great pride for Russian finance. 

Yet, for a sense of the sheer scale of Sberbank’s meltdown, it is worth remembering that Sberbank Europe had €13.6bn of assets at the end of last year. Once a banking run has started, it is almost impossible to halt.

With the Nord Stream 2 pipeline denying reports that it had filed for bankruptcy, yet still sacking all 140 of its staff, the lender can be considered the first significant domino in the Russian economy to fall.

More can be expected in the coming days. Having deployed capital controls and other counter-measures, the Russian central bank may be able to slow the bleeding but stopping it will be nigh on impossible.

Sberbank has been able to offload its Slovenian subsidiary to the country’s biggest banking group NLB, and its Croatian assets to the Croatian Postal Bank, which is majority owned by the government, for “a small nominal sum”, Koenig said.

Others may not be so fortunate. “The banking sector is facing a huge liquidity issue,” Liam Peach, a Russian expert at Capital Economics, said. 

Putin has signed a decree banning Russians from leaving the country with more than $10,000 (£7,500) in foreign currency in a desperate attempt to “ensure Russia’s financial stability”, the Kremlin said. 

Selling assets in this market, in an effort to stay afloat, will be practically impossible. Indeed, the European Central Bank has conceded that parts of Sberbank’s European arm are likely to be dissolved.

Of course, with time, the Russian economy will recover. It bounced back from the 1998 financial crash far quicker than experts predicted, largely thanks to surging oil prices. Russia’s vast energy and commodity resources will eventually see to that again. Brent crude oil is already trading at more than $111 a barrel, its highest level since 2014.

Cryptocurrencies may provide some respite, helping it to bypass sanctions, and it can probably count on support from China and other pockets of Eurasia, a dynamic that risks the creation of a dangerous new anti-west alliance. 

But for the meantime Western sanctions threaten to unleash a full-blown financial crisis upon Moscow, raising the spectre of hyper-inflation, and eventually a deep recession.

Russia is sitting on more than $600bn of foreign reserves that it was counting on to prop up the collapsing rouble. Yet, an estimated two-thirds of those that are held in London, New York and other key financial centres, are now effectively unobtainable because of sanctions imposed on the central bank.

With Russian commercial banks also ejected from the Swift interbank payments regime that facilitates cross-border payments, Putin is now experiencing what it is like to be on the wrong side of a system that the Russian elite has derided for decades.