Russia is planning to grant more than 1 trillion rubles ($15.5 billion) in loans to foreign governments and organizations over the next three years, Izvestia writes, citing the country’s draft budget for 2020-2022.
This exceeds the figures recorded over the past five years. The Finance Ministry has not unveiled the list of major credit recipients but experts told the newspaper that Turkey, India, and Iran would be among them.
Foreign credit recipients need these funds to complete projects developed jointly with Russian partners, the ministry notes. Besides, Moscow will also bankroll buyers of Russian goods. Meanwhile, in 2020-2022, Russia will get back a significantly smaller sum out of the earlier granted loans: 370 billion rubles ($5.4 billion).
Moscow will borrow less than it plans to lend: roughly 640 billion rubles ($9.7 billion), the newspaper writes.
However, Russia intends to get only $700 million in direct loans from foreign governments and organizations, according to the draft budget. At the moment, other countries owe Russia some $35 billion, Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak said, while not revealing the “geography of the borrowers.”
Russia’s major debtor is Belarus, which owes Moscow $7.5 billion, according to the Finance Ministry. Venezuela’s debt to Moscow stands at $3.5 billion, Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed earlier.
Andrei Frolov from the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies has linked the spike in Russia’s loans to foreign states to the $20 billion Russian-Turkish project on building the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant in southern Turkey.
