I think that infrastructure is also a crucial factor. Last year we had to react quickly to changes in external conditions. Meanwhile, we did not abandon our strategic objectives, we still adhere to inflation targeting that allows us to control inflation and ensure its gradual reduction. Early last year, the Central Bank actively intervened in the FX market to ease the market response to the Crimea developments and to support the ruble exchange rate. In 2014, we implement interventions in the amount of about $ billion. At the same time, we were preparing for a floating exchange rate regime. We planned to have completed the transition by late 2014. During the year, the Bank of Russia took consecutive decisions thus gradually moving to the floating exchange rate. The policy to support the ruble through interventions was sound until two important events took place last autumn. The first one was the issuance of large-scale financial sanctions, and the second one was the decline in oil prices that began in summer and accelerated dramatically following the November decision of OPEC to maintain the volumes of oil production. Then we decided to accelerate the transition to the floating exchange rate. Looking behind, I would like to confirm once again that our country needed the transition to the floating exchange rate and it was a timely decision. It was the introduction of the floating exchange rate that quickly normalised the financial situation and saved us gold and foreign currency reserves. Different solutions were unlikely to stabilise the financial system.
Against this backdrop the ruble started to appreciate and the situation even allowed us to start replenishing our gold and foreign currency reserves. Now I will give you the details of our monetary policy in 2014. We have decided to grant the access to the main refinancing instruments to a wider range of banks (the so-called 3rd tier banks) and promptly extend the Lombard List. In making the Lombard List we abandoned the exclusive reliance on the international ratings agencies in order to reduce the dependence on them and make our own asset estimation. We are developing special purpose instruments to compensate for the so-called market failures and support lending in certain areas amid low availability of loans, high interest rates, and lack of long-term money. I am talking about four instruments – support of investment projects, small and medium-sized enterprises, military mortgages and non-commodity exports. The total of 290 billion rubles is currently allocated for these instruments. The special purpose instruments will be limited in volume in order to avoid distortions in monetary policy mechanisms. However, since we have introduced these instruments, they must prove effective. Currently, our main objective is to increase their efficiency. To summarise the results of the monetary policy we implemented last year, I would like to emphasise that, first, we acted in strict compliance with the functions assigned by the Constitution and the Central Bank Law, second, in the challenging conditions we tried to be flexible and to apply non-standard approaches, yet using only market mechanisms.