Latest Updates

World headlines on bewildering collapse of lira overshadow Turkey’s announcement of 7.4% growth in 3Q

International press increasingly referring to the “Erdogan currency crisis”. “Our money has no value”, Turks complain to New York Times.

Read Story

VISEGRAD BLOG: Zeman tries to show he is still in charge of Czech foreign policy

The Czech president is threatening to veto the appointment of the new foreign minister, who wants to return to Vaclav Havel's focus on promoting human rights.

Read Story

DATACRUNCH: Croatia’s post-crisis rebound goes beyond tourism

Croatia is rebounding from the deep hit to the economy last year with a broad-based recovery, but reforms are needed for the country to build on this and take advantage of inflows of EU funds.

Read Story

LONG READ: East Europe fares better than West in gas crisis thanks to pricing terms

Europe has made a concerted push to end long-term contracts and switch to shorter-term gas hub prices. Countries in northern Europe that made that change have been burnt by the current gas price spike but those in the south that didn't fared better.

Read Story

HOMANS: Putin’s Choice – continue invading Ukraine or keep doing what he’s been doing?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear that he believes Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” and wants Ukraine to return to the Russkiy Mir. Will he achieve his objective by invading or just wear Ukraine down?

Read Story

More details emerge of alleged coup plot in Ukraine

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told journalists at a press conference in that Kyiv had information suggesting a coup d'état was being planned in the coming months involving the country’s top oligarch and Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov.

Read Story

MOSCOW BLOG: Is Russia’s build-up of troops on Ukraine’s border a new Cuban Missile crisis?

Russia has clearly been building up forces close to Ukraine’s border, but as bne IntelliNews has reported, experts are convinced that it will not actually attack. So what is really going on?

Read Story

Ready for war at any time in southern Armenia

After last year's war, Armenia’s southernmost province of Syunik is now bordered by Azerbaijan on two sides. Local people fear they are next.

Read Story

Montenegro’s dysfunctional ruling coalition limps on

Keeping President Djukanovic’s DPS out of power has proved a strong glue holding the coalition together, but rifts among its members have stalled Montenegro’s progress towards EU accession.

Latest Updates

News

Just 31.9% of respondents said Montenegro is going in a good direction as many complained the government's priorities do not align with those of the population.

Electric hypercar producer Rimac Automobili is one of the most successful Croatian companies and has an increasingly international workforce.

The foreign ministries of China and Russia have slammed the selective invites to a US-sponsored “Summit for Democracy” slated for December that saw countries like Poland and India invited, but some EU allies and Nato members excluded.

Ceremony held under strict hygiene conditions behind a plexiglass wall after President Milos Zeman contracts COVID-19.

Clashes with police as environmental activists protest against legal changes they say benefit foreign investors in polluting projects.

Tech

Russian real estate developer Samolet Group has launched a digital platform that enables customers to handle all their property-related needs in one place, as companies across industries develop their online ecosystems.

In the past few months, Russian Internet major VK (previously Mail.ru Group) demonstrated a strong appetite for online education — both in Russia and abroad.

Ilya Sachkov, the top cybersecurity businessman who was arrested under charges of “state treason” in late September, has claimed he is innocent and asked President Putin to be transferred from jail to house arrest during the investigation.

US open source software platform Grafana Labs has acquired a Russian-founded startup called Amixr. Launched in 2019, this company has developed an incident management platform that allows DevOps and SRE engineers to “optimize channels, recipients"

A smartphone with the function of mechanically disabling the camera and microphone running on a Russian operating system will be supplied to security forces and the state sector. A version of the device with Android 11 is already available in Russia.

Opinion

On November 24, Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers approved a 20-step plan outlining measures for implementing the “law on oligarchs” and the strategy for the development of the justice system in 2022–2023.

The global economy may be characterized as either “everything booms”, where virtually all asset prices have rapidly exploded in value, or steeply rising indebtedness. Which countries in CEE are most exposed to the risk of inevitable rate hikes?

On November 25 one of Romania’s most controversial and unnecessarily prolonged political crises, with profound economic and social implications, came to an end.

Yearly retail sales in Poland have recovered after a soft third quarter. It's no surprise, given that this time last year the country was hit by COVID lockdowns.

As huge swathes of the global population went into lockdown, many retailers faced heavy losses. The trends developing before the pandemic picked up pace, with online shopping and sustainable manufacturing gaining traction.

Data

Higher vegetable prices, further growth in global prices of primary commodities and cost-push pressure will push inflation above the NBS' expectations at end-2021 and in the first half of 2022.

Annual advance slowed from the double-digit growth recorded in the previous three quarters but remains robust.

Compared to October 2019, before the crisis, the volume of assets and loans surged by 29% and 36% respectively.

Croatia's economy is rebounding strongly from the deep recession in 2020 when GDP contracted by more than 8%.

Russia’s industrial production growth accelerated to 7.1% y/y in October from 6.9% y/y in September, which meant output was up 5.0% y/y in 10m21, Rostat reports.

Features

More expensive electricity means global cryptominers are avoiding Georgia.

London-listed gold miner AltynGold with assets in Kazakhstan reported strong first-half results, with revenue doubling year on year to $23mn and a net profit of $9.3mn for the period, compared to a loss in the same period a year earlier.

Thanks to a series of aggressive rate hikes by the CBR, Russian retail investors have started to put their money back into bank deposits after they invested heavily in the stock market after real interest rates fell to next to nothing.

Capital spending levels at Russia’s Gazprom are once again creeping upwards, as the company prepares to ramp up gas supplies to China and expand development in the Russian Arctic.

The country no longer has a choice, the president says.

Blogs

Political rivals the PSD and PNL have united to end the political deadlock in Romania. But their previous short-lived grand coalition doesn’t bode well.

As Erdogan subjects nation to his mad economic experiments, there are the first signs of people taking to the streets and of the country’s export channels seizing up.

Market, meanwhile, still puzzled by five-minute delay in announcing rates decision.

Mongolia, which once hoped it might avoid a major coronavirus outbreak altogether, has endured prolonged phases of the pandemic. But the data show light at the end of the tunnel.

The World Health Organization continues to indulge Turkmenistan’s lies about the coronavirus. Eurasianet's weekly briefing.

bneGREEN

Metals demand is booming as increased use in transport products and energy transition projects to curb climate change begin to roll out in larger scale. And that is unlikely to stop anytime soon.

Belgrade wants to increase energy security and is also exploring its options for reducing emissions.

A panel of leaders from Russian and British companies have called for greater international collaboration during in a discussion which took place during the COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow.

Satellites are detecting previously unknown emissions of methane from gas pipelines, oil wells, fossil fuel processing plants and landfills all over the world, with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan being particular culprits.

Emissions from coal power plants in Serbia and other Western Balkan countries have been found to cause widespread damage to health both within the region and in nearby countries.

Follow Us On

Most Read

Podcasts

Amid the global stock market rally as the world recovers from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Bucharest Stock Exchange (B....

Reports

Cookies on the bne IntelliNews website