The declining health of Russia’s economy is as clear as day — or night, a finance minister said Wednesday.
Elisabeth Svantesson, the finance minister of Sweden, said she and her officials are skeptical of how Russia’s official figures describe its economy.
One measure they use instead, she said at a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, was comparing photos of Moscow by night.
The lights there, she said, were darker in 2023 than in 2021, showing a capital and a nation in trouble.
Business Insider found some public photos showing the Moscow skyline in the years Svantesson mentioned. Here is one from March 2021:
And another from November 2023:
It’s hard to make a precise comparison — the time of day and cloud cover are different.
But in the 2023 image, the pools of light showing Moscow’s suburbs so appear larger and more frequent in the pre-invasion image.
“It’s very clear that the Russian economy is definitely not as strong as Putin wants us to believe,” Svantesson said.
She said that Moscow’s inflation is “much higher than the public figure says.” Russia’s most recent figure puts it at 9.5%, which Svantesson said was out of kilter with its main interest rate of 21%.
She also said levels of capital leaving Russia suggested a struggling economy, as do the space photos of Moscow.
“There is over Moscow, for example, a much darker picture,” she said.
“They’re not using as much electricity,” said the panel moderator, Ravi Agrawal, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.
“No, no, no. It’s much darker,” Svantesson said.
Western countries imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in the wake of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, mostly designed to cut off the oil and gas exports crucial to its economy.
The Kremlin claims it has withstood the worst potential effects of the sanctions. Per Svantesson, that vision of a strong economy is a tactic, to convince Ukraine and its allies that sanctions don’t work.
“We don’t know,” the true state of Russia’s economy, she concluded. “But what we know is that his narrative and his truth is not true.”
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