World Economic Forum/Flickr/CC BY 2.0 The World Economic Forum (WEF) takes place in Davos from January 19 to 23. The issues that are at the top of the agenda for the meeting of global leaders this year make the current WEF more similar in content not to an economic forum, but to the Munich Security Conference , which is held annually in the capital of Bavaria in February and is focused on geopolitical topics, blazing and “frozen” conflicts and global security issues.

The Kremlin has officially launched the 2026 State Duma election campaign. This will be the first national election, an important part of which will be the nomination of “SBO participants.” They have already received two of the five places in the top three of the United Russia federal list, and the most militant Russian politician, Dmitry Medvedev, topped the list. But with the political prospects of a “member of the Northern Military District” everything is not so simple.

The end of the war in Ukraine will be discussed in Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is taking place. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are flying to Switzerland to work on a peace plan. President Putin's special envoy Kirill Dmitriev's trip to Davos and his upcoming meetings with Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner were reported by Reuters and Axios journalist Barak Ravid.

Russia's largest cement producer, Tsemros (formerly Eurocement), shut down two of its 18 plants in 2025 - in the Belgorod and Ulyanovsk regions, RBC wrote . The company (which switched factories to a four-day week) explains this by a drop in demand - in 2025, actual cement consumption in Russia decreased by 9% - to 60.6 million tons. The retired volume is comparable to the workload of 5–6 cement plants. There are 60 plants in the country with a total capacity of 80 million tons per year.

A national headquarters for artificial intelligence will appear in Russia, led by Deputy Head of the Administration Maxim Oreshkin and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko. The proposal, agreed upon by the presidential administration and the government, was supported by Vladimir Putin, Kommersant reports . The publication calls this a “two-key” scheme.

Markets continue to be in a frenzy after Donald Trump announced new tariffs against eight European countries for protecting Greenland. Investors are expected to move into defensive assets. The spot price of gold for immediate delivery reached $4,690.75 at its peak, and silver exceeded $94 per troy ounce for the first time.

Trump linked his claims to Greenland to the fact that he was not given the Nobel Peace Prize, writes Bloomberg. According to the agency, the US President sent a letter to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre - and it was in it that he explained his position. In the letter, Trump claims that after being “rejected” from the award, he no longer considers himself obligated to “think exclusively about peace” and can now act based on the interests of the United States.

The IMF lowered its forecast for Russian economic growth in 2026 by another 0.2 percentage points. — from 1.0% to 0.8%. Russia will thus continue to lag behind the global rate - 3.3% in 2026 and 3.2% in 2027. Only Italy and Japan will have lower GDP growth (0.7%). Global growth, however, is fragile, and hopes for artificial intelligence may not come true. “Risks to the global economic outlook are skewed to the downside,” the IMF writes.

Dmitry Peskov today confirmed that Vladimir Putin has been invited to the Gaza Peace Council, which is being created by Donald Trump. “President Putin also received an offer through diplomatic channels to join this Peace Council,” Peskov said. “We are currently studying all the details of this proposal.

Since the beginning of the year, the number of blocks of individual accounts by Russian banks due to the fight against fraud has increased by an order of magnitude. Unblocking is not easy and costs time and nerves