RUSSIA'S government is to start delivering cash to banks from US$186 billion of pledged emergency funds in "the next few days" as it seeks to stem the biggest financial crisis in more than a decade, a Kremlin aide said.

"Markets are waiting for money, for cash," President Dmitry Medvedev's senior economic aide, Arkady Dvorkovich, told Bloomberg Television in Moscow.

The Micex stock index was suspended for a 10th time on Wednesday and rallied as much as 17 percent yesterday in response to central bank rate cuts and Medvedev's decision on October 7 to channel a further 950 billion rubles (US$36 billion) into the country's biggest banks.