right ..... but that is a different discussion all together, there are logistics involved in moving large amounts of hot money no matter how you dice it. Though chances are if you have private jets worth of notes in cyprus stored in a luxury apartment, then you can probably do with not moving it for a month in the case capital controls are in place and all the banks shut and your usual friendly bank manager cannot help you out or you cannot deposit and transfer the cash to an exchange if going down the BTC route.
I was talking about how buying BTC is not an option for people that are already in a country that capital controls have been placed (and maybe expecting a haircut or a massive devaluation) as you would not be able to access those funds to buy BTC with.
If you've already lost access, then you're S.O.L., but you could use localbitcoins and pay a premium if you can pull your money out but not take it across the border. An sd card is also less tempting for thieves and robbers (private sector or public) than a suitcase full of cash.
There was some back and forth in mid March and some restrictions were temporarily lifted for a while, but only a tiny fraction of the money deposited by wealthy russians made it into BTC, if it was a significant portion BTC would have gone way past the $1200 we saw later that year. There were quite a few dorment coins back then so the supply of coins would not have been able to trickle in fast enough.
I think most of the Russians, of the type you are referring to, most likely saw the haircut, threw a few vodka glasses around the place, boarded their helicopters, muttering about how they lost a few pennies, snorted some coke off of a hookers tit, before arriving home jumping out the bird, and returning home to their wives and children and scoffing caviar like it was going out of fashion.. before I dunno going out on a wild boar killing spree with vlad and vlad and vlad. Basically a few of them would maybe have beaten a poor cypriot half to death to calm their nerves.
Part from that, they bent over and took it like the rest of the suckers that had cash in the bank they could not reach.