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Xi, Putin meeting: “Loud thunder but few raindrops”

Chinese President Xi Jinping took his leave of Russian President Vladimir Putin from a two-day visit to Moscow with a smile on his face. But despite the important show of solidarity, Putin got little in concrete terms from the Chinese leader.

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Russian banks earn a record profit in January as the sector starts to recover from sanctions shock

Russian banks earned profits of $3.4bn in January, the most ever for the first month of the year, but the banking sector is still limping from the shock of extreme sanctions imposed last year.

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Georgia’s economy outperforms with 10% broad-based growth and record investment in 2022

The Georgian economy has bounced back fast from the series of sharp shocks of recent years, and rather than being dragged down by the polycrisis that has been unfolding.

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Putin woos 40 Africa lawmakers at Moscow conference with promises of money, nuclear power, arms and free grain

Putin took time out from meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping who had just arrived in Moscow for a three-day state visit to speak to lawmakers from more than 40 African countries and woo them with generous promises of economic and military aid

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All to play for in Russian-Chinese backyard

Russia and China will struggle for common policy on possible Russian soft underbelly Central Asia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, the vital Europe/Asia Caucasus crossroads, the Baltics, CEE and SEE.

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TBC Bank looks to Uzbekistan for growth

Georgia's leading bank is expanding its international operations and investing in cutting-edge banking technologies.

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STOLYPIN: The quiet and the noisy

There seem to be two kinds of Russian political figure: the quiet and the noisy. We tend to focus on the noisy ones for obvious reasons, but it is the quiet ones who tend to matter, and the case of Evgeny Prigozhin illustrates this perfectly.

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Demining Ukraine: "The most important thing is to protect people"

Ukraine is the most mine-contaminated country on Earth. Red warning signs bearing skulls and crossbones litter the fields and forests of liberated territories.

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News

“We will fulfil our historical responsibility against one-man rule,” says co-chair of pro-Kurdish HDP.

‘Gandhi Kemal’, battling to overcome a reputation for being a bit dull, strives to show he’s energised.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused "the collective West" of using “weapons with nuclear components,” after the UK said it would send Ukraine depleted uranium ammunition on March 22.

Ukraine has secured a staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a 48-month $15.6bn Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement, the government said on March 22.

Budapest claims that the move "hurts the cherished unity of Nato".

Tech

Ukraine’s IT sector has seen a mass migration of its employees. With former IT hubs like Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa close to the front line, many specialists have moved to Western Ukraine, where life is somewhat more normal.

Mayor says on-demand transport project was very popular but too expensive to run in a rural area.

PM Ana Brnabic says Serbia must become a leader in AI to achieve fast and dynamic economic growth in future.

Ukraine’s IT industry has remained remarkably stable in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion. While many leading sectors in Ukraine have suffered significant losses, IT saw a growth in exports helped by an impressive response from businesses.

Trading in all the names has been suspended since February 2022 following Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine.

Opinion

For the past six months, the US Fed has been fighting inflation by jacking up interest rates and tightening money supply to fight inflation. This author, and others, predicted that “something will break”. Something did break: SVB

First, as I have previously argued on this blog, I think ideally Xi would want to call an end to the war in Ukraine. It may initially have served a purpose for China, but I think Beijing now sees a real prospect of a catastrophic defeat for Moscow.

Romania’s fiscal policy continues to consolidate and borrowing needs are at a record high due to the heavy maturity calendar. However, net issuance of ROMGBs is almost the same as last year. Romania is the region's leader with 44% of planned bonds.

Russian GDP contracted by 2.1% last year. For the current year, we expect an economic decline of similar magnitude.

Though some changes in the poll formats hint at New Kazakhstan, the president’s words are ominously reminiscent of Old Kazakhstan.

Data

Six out of 10 companies surveyed by eJobs said they budgeted salary increases for this year.

Construction sector growth expected to halve in 2023, to 6.2% from 12.7% y/y in 2022.

NBRM says uncertainties related to anticipated inflation trends remained high, but it expects a slowdown in the coming months.

Fall deepens dramatically after a decline of 0.3% y/y the preceding month.

Consumer price inflation dropped from nearly 35% y/y in October to under 25% y/y in February and the BNM expects it to drop down to 6.6% by the end of the year.

Features

Despite mass demonstrations in Georgia against the seemingly pro-Russian “foreign agents” law in March and growing Russian trade turnover following the start of the war in Ukraine, the government in Tbilisi remains dedicated to joining the EU.

Only one in four voters in Almaty, the country's largest city, cast their ballot.

Pandemic and Ukraine war impacts bring hardship that makes battle to subsist outside of the city a gruelling challenge.

Longstanding ruler Milo Djukanovic is fighting off challenges from newcomer Europe Now’s candidate Jakov Milatovic and pro-Russian Andrija Mandic.

The Western Balkan countries are following the path established by Central Europe that emerged as a prominent manufacturing and services hub early in the transition period.

Blogs

The West has been increasingly supplying Ukraine with more and more powerful weapons, but always in insufficient amounts and always with a delay that does not change the tide of the conflict to Kyiv’s advantage.

Two days of mass protest have forced the ruling Georgian Dream party to back down and withdraw a proposed “foreign agents” law, which would brand NGOs and media that receive more than 20% of their income from abroad.

Israel is imminently poised to open a permanent mission in Ashgabat, 20 kilometres from the Iranian border. Eurasianet’s weekly Turkmenistan briefing.

Serbia’s violent pro-Russian far right makes President Aleksandar Vucic look like a moderate in comparison, and gives him more room to manoeuvre internationally.

Tightening internet controls as families desperately try to reach loved ones in Turkey, bogus economic performance figures, and Berdimuhamedov the elder visits the Gulf. Eurasianet’s weekly Turkmenistan briefing.

bneGREEN

The pace and scale of what has been done so far to combat climate change, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle the problem, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Landmark report urges nations to urgently start fixing water waste and start managing water as a common good with neighbours.

Global wind turbine order intake hit new highs in 2022, with 44 GW procured in the fourth quarter and 134.6 GW for the year. Both of these order intakes were records, says a new analysis by Wood Mackenzie.

At the peak of the energy crisis in October, Slovenia imported 56% of its electricity.

The Bulgarian government granted the Maritsa East 2 TPP a derogation to burn more coal and emit almost double the amount of sulphur dioxide allowed by EU law.

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