Luis Alcaide | Early morning of 26 February 2022. Invasion of Russian troops. I don’t know whether I’m in Madrid or in the Bucharest of that morning on 21 August 1968. At that time, 170,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers were invading Czechoslovakia, and the Prague Spring was a political and economic threat to the communist bloc. Czechoslovakia, which was a developed pre-World War II society and economy, offered in 1968 economic…
J.P. Marín-Arrese | Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, the US has shown utter disdain for Russia. It flouted the pledge made to Gorbatchev to keep former Warsaw Pact countries out of NATO so that Russia could have a security buffer zone along its frontiers. It openly invited the Ukrainian government to disregard the Minsk agreement, which was brokered to ensure that Ukraine would remain neutral. John Kerry, the former…
Vladimir Putin secured an easy victory, and a second consecutive six-year term, in yesterday’s first round of presidential elections. With 99% of the votes counted, he has received 77% of votes, which will extend his 18-year in power until 2024. Putin’s re-election means stability in the corporate sector, a favourable outcome for bond investors.
Xavier Colás | Russia is hoping that in 2017 its economic indicators will look brighter again after three years of questions over the country’s economic health due to sanctions, rock-bottom oil prices and a rouble which has lost half of its value.
Bungling with Russia over Crimea will send the West knocked out with a bloody nose. One way or another, it was a crisis a long time coming. Europe has arguably sleepwalked into a reluctant confrontation with Russia. The continent’s next-door behemoth of a neighbor, saddled by a man it secretly detests the most, is also its largest energy supplier, irascible trading partner and purveyor of most maladies diplomatic.
MADRID | By J. J. Fdez-Figares (LINK) | The main European and American stock markets closed yesterday up in a new session with low activity and reduced volatility, where the investors interpreted the words of the Russian President Putin, in his speech in Crimea, as an attempt to avoid the international isolation of his country as a result of their involvement in Ukraine. Yesterday again the macroeconomic figures published in the Eurozone surprised negatively because to the shrinking economic growth in Germany in the 2Q 2014, the first produced since 1Q 2012 during the euro crisis, the stagnation of the French economy and in the whole of the eurozone during the same period – the German and French economies account for about 50% of the Eurozone.
MADRID | By Álex García.
LONDON | Russian presidential election on Monday arose more questions than certainties, from politics to the country’s economy. As international observers cast a long shadow over the fairness and transparency of the process, thousands of Russians demonstrated to challenge Vladimir Putin’s victory, crowding into a central Moscow square to chant slogans against the former Federal Security Services director. Despite democratic concerns, Putin has once again grabbed the power in Russia….