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The Regions This Week
August 17, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
Eastern Europe
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko believes that the Russian leadership acts in
"a barbaric way" towards Minsk, considering his country to be like "their vassals" amid reports that Moscow intends to limit its credit support and oil subsidies to Belarus.
A mission of Ukraine's main donor, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), will make a working visit to Kyiv from September 6 to September 19 to discuss the country’s crucial but stalled $17.5bn stand by package. The rumour is that a deal has already been agreed that will release billions of badly needed dollars.
Russian social media site vKontakte (VK) expanded its privacy functions to give its users more tools to protect them from arrest. The Kremlin has been cracking down on online criticism of the government: of 182 criminal cases launched in 2017 for social network posts, 138 were based on VK posts.
Russia’s GDP expanded by 1.8% in the second quarter, a bit weaker than analysts were expecting but up from 1.3% in the first quarter and continuing in the right direction, economists said on August 12.
Russia Inc will be in profit this year with a budget surplus of between 1.5%-2% of GDP, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov said on August 13.
Russia’s industrial production unexpectedly improved in July, rising to 3.9% y/y after taking
a hit a month earlier when it fell back to 2.2% in June, Rosstat reports. In particular manufacturing grew 4.6% y/y in July versus a more modest 2.2% y/y the previous month and that added up to a 4.1% y/y gain in 7m18.
The Ukrainian banking sector made a net profit of UAH8.3bn ($305mn) in January-June,
according to the NBU’s August banking sector review. The banking sector reported a moderate loss of UAH400mn in April-June due to the raising of additional provisioning by one large bank in April-June.
Mortgages are booming in Russia with the volumes of credits issued expanding by 60% y/y, according to the website Dom.rf. Russia is on course to issue 1.5mn mortgage loans worth more than RUB3 trillion rubles this year or 1.5 times higher than in 2017.
Russian consumer lending is back and the
total volume of loans topped RUB1.4 trillion
in the first seven months of this year, the CBR reported. Since the beginning of the year, the indebtedness of Russians to banks has grown
by 11.6% as of the end of July, while wage growth is zero.
Russian banks made a combined RUB776bn in net profit in the first seven months of the year, down more than 15.7% y/y after a state bailout of troubled lenders, according to the CBR. The bank sector made RUB142bn in July, the same as in the same month last year.
With the bulk of the harvest in, Ukraine is on course to collect the same 60mn tonnes of grain that it brought in last year. The harvest of grain in Ukraine in 2017 was 61.3mn tonnes.
Russian oil producers have already returned oil production to record levels this year and will boost crude production next year thanks to the launch of several greenfield projects, OPEC said. Russian oil production has increased recently to a record 11.2mn barrels a day. OPEC expects that average oil production in Russia will be 11.15mn barrels per day in 2018 and 11.17mn barrels daily in 2019.