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to 90% of fruit and berry seeds, according to Carnegie.
Livestock is a bit better, as Russia is self-sufficient in beef and covers 70-75% of its own needs, but breeding stock remains heavily dependent on imports, as do animal medicines.
The story is the same with agricultural machinery. In the 70s the Soviet government mechanised agriculture and the tractor became the symbol of the Soviet wonderland. Many of those tractor plants are still going today, such as the famous tractor plant in Minsk, but three quarters of machinery was imported last year, mostly from Germany and the Netherlands.
The Kremlin has already won concessions to ease some of these sanctions, but it will continue to play games with grain exports to maintain the pressure while it lobbies to have more of the sanctions lifted.
“Moscow may decide at any moment to withdraw unilaterally from the agreement, despite all the benefits for Russian farmers and the economy. During the past five months, President Vladimir Putin has made it clear time and time again that economic logic is of little use in trying to predict his actions,” concludes Prokopenko.
2.2 Russia sees the biggest inflows of foreign exchange ever
Russia sees the biggest inflows of foreign exchange ever. Why the ruble will not continue to fall in price but in the first weeks of July weakened from around RUB50 to the dollar to RUB60 after oil prices came off their recent peak.
“There is a difference between the stock of capital Russia has and the flow,” says Robin Brooks, the chief economist at Institute of International Finance (IIF). “It is the flow of capital that affects the exchange rate, not the stock.”
The Central Bank reported a phenomenal surplus in the trade balance and current account: in the second quarter of 2022, the historical record was almost doubled. Both this figure and the latest data on exports and imports leave little chance for the ruble to weaken significantly against the dollar in the coming months, analysts say.
The current account surplus of Russia's balance of payments (the sum of the difference between exports and imports and income from foreign investment and transfer payments) for the first half of 2022 amounted to $138bn. This is already more than for the whole of 2021 of $110bn, which was also a record and 3.5 times more than in the same period in 2021, and almost 2.5 times more than the previous semi-annual record recorded in 2008.
11 RUSSIA Country Report October 2020 www.intellinews.com