Pretty sure last month is when they announced they'd be paying China in gold for their exports. I guess spending registers as selling, especially for a journalist.
Discussion
No, this is something different. This is the Russian Central Bank literally selling physical bars out of its vault to domestic buyers.
The Chinese thing is that they're the last export market left for Russian gold miners. It has a lot of gold mines, but the domestic market is too thin to absorb what it produces.
So the Russian government is distributing real wealth to the public? Unusual.
I don't see any mention of that in the legacy media article you linked to though.
Google it.
It would probably send me to a legacy media article. Then tell me to enlist to storm the Russian border, the border of the country that is forever Schrodinger's country... ever about to imminently collapse but also conquer the world if we don't engage in a world war, depending on what day it is.