A private Russian space company is facing bankruptcy amid a broader pattern of industry failures, underscoring the mounting challenges facing Russia’s once-ambitious commercial space sector, The Moscow Times reported. SR Space, founded in 2020 by aerospace entrepreneur Oleg Mansurov, is the latest in a string of private ventures on the verge of collapse. Russia’s Federal Tax Service has initiated bankruptcy proceedings against the firm after freezing its accounts at four banks earlier this year over unpaid tax obligations, the Kommersant business daily reported.
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Russia’s government is weighing the possibility of some tax relief for the giant gas firm Gazprom, which would be paid for by potentially higher taxes on other Russian natural gas producers, a source in the Russian government told Reuters on Monday. Gazprom has been bleeding cash since it cut off most of its pipeline gas deliveries to Europe in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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A supplier of military microelectronic components in Stavropol, Russia, has not been providing Moscow with important parts for its aircraft as the Kremlin cannot pay enough, its leadership said, the Kyiv Post reported. The company, Optron-Stavropol, reportedly was being paid so little by the Ministry of Defense for its orders that it suffered losses and mounting debts so great as to suspend production earlier this year.
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Russia’s economy is “on the brink of going into a recession,” the country’s economy minister said Thursday, according to Russian media reports, the Associated Press reported. Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov delivered the warning at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the annual event in Russia’s second largest city designed to highlight the country’s economic prowess and court foreign investors. Russian business news outlet RBC quoted the official as saying “the numbers indicate cooling, but all our numbers are (like) a rearview mirror.
On 10 June, the Moscow Exchange began calculating and publishing a new index — Bitcoin — and the calculation will take place daily at 12.30, Realnoe Vremya reported. The index is calculated as a weighted average of prices taking into account the weighting factors of the selected trading platforms. The weighting factors of the crypto exchanges are calculated based on the trading volumes of the instruments being monitored and will be revised quarterly. In the future, the indicator may become the underlying asset for financial instruments, experts note.
The European Commission has proposed an 18th package of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, aimed at Moscow's energy revenues, its banks and its military industry, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The new package proposes banning transactions with Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines, as well as banks that engage in sanctions circumvention.
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Russia’s central bank on Friday lowered its key interest rate for the first time since late 2022 despite an inflation rate that remains well above target, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Bank of Russia cut its key rate to 20% from 21%, and said it expects the economy to return to a more “balanced” growth path after a surge in activity and prices as workers and resources were employed for the war in Ukraine.
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One of Microsoft Corp's subsidiaries in Russia plans to file for bankruptcy, according to a note published on the official Fedresurs registry on Friday, Reuters reported. President Vladimir Putin said this week that foreign service providers like Microsoft and Zoom should be "throttled" in Russia to make way for domestic software solutions. Microsoft continued providing key services in Russia after Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but in June 2022 it said it was significantly scaling down its operations due to changes to the economic outlook and the impact on its business there.
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Russia’s successes on the front lines in Ukraine are a big reason why Vladimir Putin isn’t yet ready to sign up to President Trump’s peace efforts. Some of his neighbors fear the success of the war machine now driving its economy means he never will, the Wall Street Journal reported. In the early stages of the war, the Russian president put the country on a footing for a long conflict. Putin retooled the economy to churn out record numbers of tanks and howitzers, while using sizable signing bonuses of up to a year’s salary to raise a massive army.
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The Russian economy is in an increasingly precarious state as a result of a shift to a war mode and of Western sanctions over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, a report by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The report, prepared for talks of European Union finance ministers, said that while still relatively stable, the Russian economy was only superficially resilient and that underlying imbalances and structural weaknesses were growing.
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