Russia isn't playing nice.
This makes institutions and people with mobile capital nervous.
If holders or rubles (mostly Russians) want to get rid of them (to move wealth out of Russia) they will offer more rubles for (say) dollars. By the same token, if people with wealth denominated in other currencies are less interested in Russia, they'll demand more rubles per dollar too. The exchange rate has gone from 75 to 81 rubles per dollar over the last 10 days. It bottomed out around 70 in late October, and has been heading upward since then. I don't recall exactly when Russia started ramping up threats against Ukraine this time, but it was before Christmas.
In finance, a CDS is short for Credit Default Swap. I won't get into the details of how these work, but basically they're a way to insure yourself if you hold a government's bonds and are worried about them defaulting. Buyers of them want to insure, and sellers are willing to sell them now in the hope that the default never happens. Increases in their price either means a lot more people want to insure against a default, or that it's getting harder to find sellers willing to insure your risk. The price of CDS's for Russian bonds have been going up too (24% in the last week alone). This indicates that people who own Russian bonds (for whatever reason) and holding onto them, are marking sure they're have more insurance.
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