Russia's government plans to support the country's financial markets by buying shares in Russian companies, the finance minister Alexei Kudrin said yesterday, Charles Clover reports from Moscow .

"This is an investment of the National Wealth Fund into reliable and highly profitable securities," he said, referring to one of the nation's two sovereign wealth funds. Russia's RTS stock index fell 6.5 per cent yesterday, as investors worried about the credit crunch, which has caused a payments crisis and a run on two retail banks.