This month, Sergei Polonsky, one of Russia’s largest and most indebted property developers, is trying to prevent powerful western banks from calling in their loans.

But as his company, Mirax, battles on, he admits he is in a cognitive fog. “Frankly, everything is uncertain right now,” he told a gathering of bankers, business leaders and policymakers that I attended in Moscow this week. “We don’t know whether to cut any contracts in roubles or dollars, or something else. We don’t know what prices for anything will be, what demand will be, what our market will look like.”