MOSCOW: Russia’s economy is in a state of “unstable equilibrium”, Russian economic analysts said in a report, with the growth stimuli that prevented a serious slump last year petering out and new drivers struggling to gain traction.

Russia’s economy proved unexpectedly resilient when faced with tough Western sanctions last year, helped by rising military production and huge state spending, but a return to pre-conflict levels of prosperity remains a long way off.

Analysts at Russia’s Centre for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-term Forecasting wrote in the report that growth drivers that limited the economic contraction to just 2.1% in 2022 were waning and the requisite increases in private investment and commodity exports were not yet bearing fruit.

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2023