The head of the biggest Russian bank Sberbank warned on Wednesday that the country's banking crisis was only just beginning, two days after Vladimir Putin said the threat to the system had receded.

"A banking crisis in Russia is in its very beginning and it will come from the real sector of the economy," the RIA-Novosti news agency quoted Sberbank chief executive Gref as saying at a conference.

Gref said that he had forecast at a government meeting in September 2008 that gross domestic product would contract by four percent.

"Everybody was laughing at it back then," said Gref, a former long-serving minister of economic development who was appointed to head the state-owned bank.

"But it is obvious today that these are absolutely real figures that will apparently be realized."

Gref's remarks come on the heels of Monday's announcement by Putin that the government had managed to avert the banking crisis.

"The threat of a banking system has receded. And it had been literally on the doorstep," Prime Minister Putin told the Russian parliament as he presented his government's anti-crisis plans.

He also said the ruble had stabilised after losing over a third of its value and that inflation would likely drop in 2009.

Mounting economic troubles have cast doubt on the future of Putin's government, whose popularity is largely based on the growth and stability achieved during his eight-year presidency that ended in 2008.