Translated material
The cost of war in Ukraine. Online October 7
The Bell continues to conduct online, dedicated to the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine, which began on February 24.
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The war completely changed our lives. We have been writing about its consequences for each of us online since February 24. We have never taken money from readers for content, believing that we can earn money ourselves. But now our business model, like so much else in the economy, has collapsed. Help The Bell keep going!
22:08 Today, the Russian Memorial Center, recognized as a foreign agent and liquidated by the Ministry of Justice, received the Nobel Peace Prize. And today, a meeting was held in the Tverskoy Court of Moscow, at which it was decided to take away the premises in Karetny Ryad from the organization, reports Mediazona (recognized as a foreign agent). What happened and why it matters - in our news .
21:18 The author of the novels "Metro 2033" and "The Post" Dmitry Glukhovsky is recognized as a foreign media agent. in the register . Sociologist Iskender Yasaveev and journalist Yevgenia Baltatarova are also included
There is also a new addition to the register of individuals-foreign agents. The rapper Oxxxymiron (Miron Fedorov), as well as activists Irina Storozheva and Alena Popova, got into it.
20:50 Playrix, the developer of Gardenscapes, Homescapes and Township games, has decided to leave Russia and Belarus. This was reported by the Ukrainian website Ain.ua with reference to a letter from the founders of the company, brothers Igor Bukhman and Dmitry Bukhman. Whether Playrix games will remain available for Russian and Belarusian users is not specified.
20:15 Both Putin and Zelensky agreed to take part in the G20 summit, told the Indonesian ambassador to the UAE reporters. The summit will be held in mid-November in Bali. Whether negotiations between the presidents of Russia and Ukraine will be possible under the current conditions is not clear: earlier this week, Zelensky approved the decision of the National Security and Defense Council on the impossibility of negotiations with Putin.
UPD: Peskov confirmed that Russia will participate in the G20 summit in Indonesia, but stressed that the format of participation has not yet been determined.
UPD2: A spokesman for Zelensky said that the final decision on the participation of the President of Ukraine in the G20 summit has not yet been made.
19:12 Annual inflation in Russia in September slowed down to 13.68% from 14.3% in August. At the end of the month, consumer prices rose by a symbolic 0.05% after three months of summer deflation.
19:04 Sberbank warned of problems in the operation of its services abroad. According to the press service of the bank, cited by Forbes, some of Sber's clients abroad may encounter difficulties when using its online services. The bank explained this by technical work, which will be completed "in the near future." How many clients were affected by the failure, the press service did not specify.
complain about problems with the Sberbank application Bank customers located in Turkey , Georgia , Tajikistan, Armenia , Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and other countries . According to some of them, you can only log in when using a VPN with Russian IP addresses. Without a VPN, the Sberbank application does not load beyond the start page, and the site does not load at all. According to DownRadar, complaints about Sberbank services began to arrive on Friday from 12:00 Moscow time.
17:01 Aliexpress Russia is on the verge of a major crisis. As The Bell found out, after the outbreak of the war, the Chinese Alibaba, and after it the other shareholders, refused to finance the company. As a result, Aliexpress Russia has already laid off more than 50% of its employees. What happened to one of the three largest Russian marketplaces, read here .
16:20 Inspection of ships going through the grain corridor from Ukraine through the Turkish straits has slowed down twice over the month, , drew attention Andrey Sizov, director of the Sovecon analytical center . That is, formally Ukraine exports a million tons of grain per week, but in fact it gets stuck in transit.
15:33 Global Fashion Group (GFG) has agreed to sell the business of online retailer Lamoda in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan to Yakov Panchenko. Panchenko is the owner of the Stockmann department store chain in Russia. Lamoda was planned to be transferred to Sberbank, but the deal did not go through due to sanctions against the state bank .
15:13 Chinese UnionPay cards issued by Russian banks are less and less welcome in Europe. a revision of its policy for servicing UnionPay cards of Russian banks in its ATMs did not rule out Swiss Raiffeisen , and Spanish Santander stopped accepting them “as part of its sanctions policy”.
This week, the Commercial Bank of the Czech Republic stopped working with UnionPay cards, regardless of the issuing country, and earlier, due to the increased demand for cash from the Russians, the Finnish network of Nosto ATMs stopped servicing UnionPay cards.
After Visa and Mastercard left Russia, the UnionPay system remains practically the only one for clients of Russian banks that allows them to withdraw cash and pay abroad. However, such cards were expensive from the very beginning and often did not have full functionality - for example, in online stores .
13:46 Human rights activist lawyer Pavel Chikov said that the decision to initiate the first criminal case on evasion from appearing on the agenda for mobilization (Article 328 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) has been canceled. The Prosecutor's Office of the Penza region recognized the decision to initiate proceedings as illegal. The suspect received the right to rehabilitation.
13:00 The pro-military channel "Military Informant" reported a drone attack on the Shaikovka airfield in the Kaluga region, where Tu-22M3 bombers are based.
According to the Baza channel, the device was not launched from the territory of Ukraine. The Readovka channel claims that the drone was nevertheless launched in Ukraine, flew over the territory of Russia for more than 200 km and was shot down over a military airfield. Shaikovka is located 250 km from Moscow.
UPD The drone explosion was confirmed by the governor of the region.
12:37 Putin signed the law on credit holidays for the mobilized. It also spells out the termination of loan obligations in the event of death or disability of the first group. The government believes that banks should take on the additional burden.
12:03 The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was shared by the Russian Memorial Center recognized by a foreign agent and liquidated by the Ministry of Justice, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and the Belarusian activist Ales Byalyatsky.
11:54 From today's EU summit in Prague, heated debates are expected about a single limit on gas prices, writes The Wall Street Journal. The dividing line lies between those countries that do not support the ceiling, but are able to support their own economy (Germany with its plan for 200 billion euros) and those that do not have such an opportunity, and rely on pan-European mechanisms (Italy).
The European Commission will look for a compromise and no longer denies the gas ceiling in some form. The day before, Italy and three other countries outlined the concept of a gas price corridor that depends on external conditions and does not exclude emergency purchases above the ceiling.
11:15 The American Sylvamo Corporation, which produced bleached paper in Russia under the SvetoCopy brand, sold Russian assets to local management. The transaction amount is 24.7 billion rubles or $420 million. The main Russian asset is the Svetogorsk Pulp and Paper Mill in the Leningrad Region.
The pulp and paper industry was one of the first to feel the effect of the sanctions. Why the crisis hit the billion-dollar industry so quickly and so painfully, read here .
The main thing for the night and morning:
- Airfare prices have fallen back to levels before mobilization - the second wave of "military" emigration dried up in two weeks, writes Kommersant . But this time the number of return tickets was much less.
- The CSR estimated the total losses of foreign business in Russia since February at $200-$240 billion. A third of the 600 largest foreign companies in Russia have limited their activities, 15% decided to leave the country through the sale of a division to a new owner, 7% announced a complete exit without selling the business. The average discount to the asset price is 70%.
- The Russian stores of the German household goods chain OBI are changing their name , probably to HOBI or OBBI. The rebranding will cost 1.5-2 million rubles for each of the 27 hypermarkets, meanwhile, sales of building and finishing materials fell by 15% in two weeks of mobilization.
- After a statement by Vladimir Zelensky calling on NATO to launch a pre-emptive strike to "rule out the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons," US President Joe Biden said he takes Vladimir Putin's nuclear threats seriously. Biden stated that he would like to know the "exit strategy" of the Russian president from the escalation, which would allow him to save face and not lose influence.
- The US will respond to the decision of OPEC + to cut oil production by 2 million b / d, and not only with oil supplies from the strategic reserve. bill has surfaced in Congress, The administration does not rule out a ban on the export of gasoline and diesel fuel from the United States, an “anti-OPEC” and an initiative is being prepared to withdraw the US military and missile defense systems from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
- over the past few weeks Chip makers have seen a sharp slowdown in demand , as geopolitics (limiting supplies to China) and a recession looming have been added to the market cycle.
- The court postponed the hearing in the Twitter v. Musk case to give the billionaire time to buy the social network.