5 Roubles Budapest Operation

Part of the "70th Anniversary of Victory" commemorative series issued by the Bank of Russia, this piece marks the Budapest Offensive of October 1944 through February 1945, in which Soviet and Romanian forces encircled and ultimately took the Hungarian capital from German and Hungarian defenders. The siege lasted 50 days and produced some of the heaviest urban fighting in the European theater after Stalingrad.

The series runs to dozens of individual battle and campaign issues, all struck in nickel-plated steel rather than the cupro-nickel of earlier commemoratives — a cost-reduction decision that has made the set widely accessible but less durable in circulation.