DISINFO: Russia proves the great strength of its economy
SUMMARY
Russia proved the great strength of its economy. In 2024, Russia was the first foreign investor in Iran’s economy. Inside the Asian continent, not only China but also Iran look for an essential approchement in exchanges with Russia, which proves its importance in the Eurasian context, and also in the global one.
RESPONSE
The headline is deliberately misleading. This is part of what some experts have labelled Russia’s economic war propaganda, aimed at convincing the world about the futility of the sanctions imposed on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine and the need to remove them.
While the data about Russia becoming the first foreign investor in Iran in 2024 is correct, it hardly proves “the strength of Russia’s economy”. Russia’s official economic figures point to a sharp economic slowdown in 2025, falling from 4.3% GDP growth in 2024 to 2.5% this year, with many economists expecting an ever lower figure of around 1.5%.
A report published in early June 2025 by Russia’s Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CAMAC), an economics research organization close to the Kremlin, warned that the economy is sliding toward the brink of "stagflation" and stated that the "economic dynamics" in Russia are "rapidly declining, with a risk of a technical recession in the second and third quarters" of 2025. Another report by the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) compared the economic situation of Russia to a “hangover after a sugar high”, highlighting “an acute labor shortage, inflation, and a recent slowdown in growth” while identifying “key future bottlenecks that have the potential to pose significant threats to Russia’s adaptation strategy, such as uncertain oil revenues, a diminished current account, an economic overreliance on China, and a potential credit crisis”.
Russia’s oil exports fell sharply in the second quarter of 2025 due to the latest EU sanctions targeting Russian shadow tankers, with exports plunging -29% in the first week of June. In mid-May 2025, Gazprom’s CEO warned about the depletion of old high-yield, low-cost oil fields that has forced Russia to tap so-called hard-to-recover oil reserves. Other economists also pointed to a degraded long-term economic outlook for many different reasons.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that sanctions have turned Russia into an economic super power, that foreign firms that exited Russia are now lining up to return, that Putin has shown Russia’s economic supremacy to the world, that Russia became the World's 4th economic power thanks to the war in Ukraine, that Russia’s economy is massively outperforming that of the collective West, or that the Russian economy thrives despite EU sanctions.