The US took a mild path for the time being with the new sanctions on Russia’s debt. Sanctioning the primary market activity of OFZs for US entities has little impact on Russia and international financial markets.
For financial market investors, Russia is currently in the same basket as Turkey and Ukraine, but only on a temporary basis.
Perhaps the most important thing for the Russian leadership in this episode was to prevent the need to actually go to war against Ukraine in the future. Going for overkill in terms of military manoeuvres now prevents actual war later.
In 1Q21, ruble weakness was caused not just by political tensions, but also by a disappointing trade balance and resumed preference for foreign assets by residents. ING has downgraded its mid-year ruble expectations to USD/RUB75.
Ukraine has announced that it will not hold further peace talks in Minsk within the framework of the Trilateral Contact Group.
For the past couple of weeks, videos have flooded social media showing convoys of Russian military trucks, trains full of tanks, and hordes of helicopters heading toward Ukraine. The question everyone’s asking is: is Russia going to invade Ukraine?
Russia has the most troops on Ukraine's border than at any time since 2014 but what does Russian President Vladimir Putin actually hope to gain? Tim Ash, Senior Sovereign Strategist at BlueBay Asset Management runs through the possibilities
The medical consensus is that it takes roughly two months for someone to die of starvation. Dying, as Gore Vidal drily observed, can be a good career move, but it has its downside. Jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny is on hunger strike.
After much anticipation, US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy finally spoke on the phone last Friday.
Russia will probably not invade, at least in the short term, but it won’t stop threatening Ukraine until it believes that it doesn’t pose a future threat to the current regime in Russia.
Russian forces are on the move around Donbas and into Crimea, and the unsettling thing for the outside world is that we don’t know why.
The ceasefire in Ukraine’s Donbas region has eroded in recent weeks. Last Friday, four Ukrainian soldiers were killed amid heavy fighting near Shymy in the Donetsk region as Russian-backed forces attacked Ukrainian lines.
After Russia’s central bank (CBR) raised its key interest rate to 4.5% on March 19, metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska called the move an “attack on Russians’ incomes and companies’ profits.”
A rare unifying figure in a divided country, Fino led Albania away from the brink of civil war after the collapse of huge Ponzi schemes in 1997.
The Ukrainian economy experienced a relatively mild contraction in 2020, but its growth rate in 2021 is unlikely to be spectacular.
According to a recent survey from the Razumkov Centre, 59% of Ukrainians are in favour of their country joining the EU, while 26% are opposed. That said, the polling results show significant variation when broken down by region and age group.
Sovereign debt sanctions targeting Russia's ability to issue foreign currency debts are once again in the news, with the Biden administration and Boris Johnson’s UK government both said to be considering the move.
Julian Rimmer mulls over the management style of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and why Turkey always seems to be in crisis.
During the 4th German-Ukrainian Business Forum, Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasised Ukraine and Germany’s long-standing partnership, but she remained committed to the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
On Saturday, March 20, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the President’s Office in Kyiv, demanding the immediate release of Serhiy Sternenko, a controversial Odesa activist who was sentenced to seven years in prison last month.