Russia’s war budget got a brief respite this spring, when the Iran war pushed oil prices up. By July, it was gone. A single month swung from a rare surplus to an $8.8 billion deficit, leaving the seven-month shortfall already bigger than the entire deficit Russia ran last year, withContinue Reading
Ukraine’s wartime business optimism has split in two. In July, the construction sector, funded by state money for roads and damaged infrastructure, remained the country’s most confident, even as service firms slid into outright pessimism, and overall confidence in the economy stopped improving. The divide is about money. Rebuilding, paidContinue Reading
Russia has lowered its benchmark for technological independence. A revised government target now requires domestic hardware to make up 58.7% of state technology projects by 2030—down from the 80% Moscow had long promised—a reduction proposed by Russia’s own Ministry of Industry and Trade and set by a decree signed inContinue Reading
Nearly half of the bankruptcy cases now moving through Ukraine’s commercial courts—45% of over 6,107—involve individuals and sole proprietors rather than companies, the Ministry of Justice reported on 30 July. Individuals could not legally file for bankruptcy in Ukraine until 2019. Ukraine’s bankruptcy law is being rebuilt around the EuropeanContinue Reading
Another Wildberries warehouse burned overnight, this time in Penza, over 600 kilometers southeast of Moscow—the latest in Ukraine’s two-week drone campaign against Russia’s biggest online retailer. The buildings, it turns out, are the least of it. The strikes work not by destroying warehouses, which can be replaced, but by breakingContinue Reading
Drivers in Russian-occupied Crimea who paid in advance for gasoline can’t use their coupons—and at the peninsula’s largest station network, they can’t get their money back either. It is the newest turn in a fuel crisis that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and supply routes have driven since spring: theContinue Reading