Russia Talks With IMF Make Western Analysts Boil Over

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Written by Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has postponed its consultation mission with Russia over alleged technical issues (indefinitely), according to Alexei Mozhin, Russia’s director at the IMF. The now postponed visit which was scheduled to start last week would have been the first official visit of a major international financial body to the country since the February 2022 crisis in Ukraine.

The last IMF annual mission to visit Russia took place in November 2019, before the pandemic. The planned IMF mission has in fact been the target of a lot of Western criticism. Russia has indeed suspended its membership from a number of multinational institutions and yet two weeks ago it was reported that the IMF was “coming back” to Russia. The “wartime review” was postponed after European states protested.

In any case, some Western analysts have criticized the IMF for what they saw as a “victory” for “Russian propaganda.” Others still have seen it as a sign of “desperation” from Moscow, based on the fact that the Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that “yes, we have the budget revenues growing, and the deficit is minimal, non-oil and gas revenues have a good performance, oil and gas ones have the incremental growth but there is no spare money.” Not too much should be made of this matter-of-fact admission, though. The Russian Federation, today’s most heavily sanctioned state on the planet, is doing quite well economically, overall.

Its economy has grown by 4.4 percent in the first seven months of 2023 – which is fairly higher than the 3.2 growth the IMF had forecasted for the country (and that was already more than in any of the world’s most advanced economies).

In 2023, according to World Bank data, its GNI per capita grew by 11.2% and reached US$ 14250, thereby making Russia a “high-income” country for the first time since 2015 – before it was considered “upper-middle-income”. However, it is still true that the nation is facing inflation and some labor shortages. More importantly, financial discipline will be needed in the face of the lack of foreign cash reserves. The state’s National Wealth Fund boasted $143billion of reserves in July 2022, but, as of the end of 2023, this has gone down to $56 billion.

Now, back to the IMF – its ongoing engagement with Russia must be seen as part of a larger context: four emerging market nations (namely Russia, China, Brazil and India) are among the ten largest members of the IMF. After years of criticizing the IMF, Moscow seems to be reversing its stance by its recent announcement of a representative with the organization – and some see this as a major shift.

The truth is that, contrary to Western propaganda, Moscow has actually sought to cooperate with them and the West since the nineties – time again being betrayed by the West in the process. I’ve written before on the breach of the 1990 promise (on NATO expansion) for instance.

As I also wrote before, although the Russian leader Vladimir Putin himself was never a radical “Westernist” in the likes of Boris Yeltsin, one could perhaps describe him as moderate and pragmatic Westernist – albeit one who is also a gosudarstvennik (someone who advocates for a strong sovereign State), in line with a certain Russian political tradition.

Sao Paulo University History Professor Angelo de Oliveira Segrillo, along these lines, has compared Putin to the French leader Charles de Gaulle, who often opposed both NATO and the US not out of a mere “anti-Western stance” but rather would do so out of being in the position of someone who is defending the national interests of its own country. In his interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin talks, for instance, about his conversations with then US President Bill Clinton on the topic of Russia joining NATO (to be clear: that would require a major reform within the organization) – something which of course never happened.

Be it as it may, with regards to the Ukrainian crisis, and the overall frictions between Russian and the West, the Russian stance is not simply due to the supposed personal inclinations of the President, whatever they are (as Western propaganda would have it). Whatever one’s opinions are on Moscow’s decision to launch its 2022 campaign in Ukraine which persists to this day, one must take into consideration the fact that, from Moscow’s point of view, the Kremlin has mostly taken a defensive and counter-offensive approach towards the American-led West over the latter’s many provocations and over many incidents which constituted crossing red lines, from a Russian perspective. In any case, as recently as late 2021, Russian and Germany were major energy partners, a partnership materialized through the (now gone) Nord Stream.

Much has been talked about BRICS structures replacing or antagonizing the IMF. It is more about providing further alternatives. It would be inaccurate to think of BRICS as necessarily a kind of anti-Western bloc. The emergence of BRICS + illustrates this quite clearly.

Despite being involved in its regional conflict with neighboring Ukraine (a confrontation which is also a Western proxy war), Russia has successfully resisted the temptations of a Western pushed cold war mentality and of alignmentism, and has instead invested on mutually beneficial bilateral relations with powers such as Pakistan and India, that on turn also pragmatically pursue their good ties with the West.

It is the Western European states and Washington which increasingly demand alignment. However, from Africa to Latin America and Saudi Arabia, the emerging polycentric world is increasingly framed in the language of multi-alignment and non-alignment – this being clearly a language which the West does not speak so well. Russian current dialogue with the IMF is yet another sign of such pragmatism.

Neither the Global South nor China or Russia are essentially “anti-Western”. It is the US-led West and Washington itself particularly who demand alignmentism, thereby alienating potential partners and allies. As I wrote recently, even within the trans-atlantic alliance, US relations with its European partners could be better described as colonial in nature.

Once again, Russia is not anti-Western. It is the US-led West that is opposed to any kind of multi-alignment or multipolarity. In a way, Washington places itself against the world. It is not a nice place to be.