St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) starts today – Russia’s preeminent investment conference. But it will be a cut-down affair, as most of the international investors are staying away. Everyone used to go to this jamboree. In the past French President Emmanuel Macron, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink and Deutsche Bank CEO Joseph Ackermann have been amongst the A-list invitees, plus anyone who was anyone in banking and finance was there.

And it is a lot of fun. St Pete is in the midst of the “White Nights” where the sun is still hot at 2am in the morning and is an extraordinarily beautiful city. Several oligarchs throw parties during the event. Mikhail Prokhorov’s were the ones to go to and legendary. He sits at the bar buying everyone drinks and for some reason there is a crowd of extremely beautiful girls at this bash. This year the leading lights will be from Indian and the Middle East with a smattering of Africans thrown in. (Africa has its own head of state event in St Petersburg in August.)

The cut-down event is a testimony to the evolution of Russia’s relations with the West. This event started as the Russia Economic Forum in the QEII centre over the road from Parliament in the UK in the freewheeling 90s. That event was even more fun (workwise) as everyone – journalists, oligarchs, ministers, top bankers – were all thrown into one giant gallery, and you could talk to anyone about anything.

After Russian President Vladimir Putin took over the state organ Roscongress basically hijacked REF and moved it to St Pete. I remember bumping into Steve Jennings, the CEO of Renaissance Capital, at the registration for the last REF after the Kremlin announced the launch of SPIEF that was due to happen the same days. Everyone was a bit confused, but many, including Steve, had decided to cut their trip to London short and go on to St Petersburg – just in case.

You still have a lot of access to the bigwigs at SPIEF, but it has started to get more controlled. At first it was held at LenExpo on the river in the heart of the city, which is a beautiful Soviet-era “people’s palace” open space, but then they moved it to the new conference centre out of town and the atmosphere began to become suffocating. This year the cycle has come to an end and Western journalists have been banned completely. I was actually invited to chair a panel on the Global South with the top Arab partners so I could have sneaked in, but I said no for obvious reasons.

It's easy to run this year’s SPIEF down, but it is emblematic of Putin’s efforts to build a non-aligned BRICS+ alternative to the Western hegemony, which is going surprisingly well. For details of this about face from West to East, take a look at the new foreign policy concept which outlines the new direction in detail.

The US lent heavily on Western companies to boycott the event, but we won’t know until today if any have showed up. I expect there will be a few surprises, as this war has to end sometime. There are many Western companies that want to maintain relations with Russia, hoping to restart their businesses as soon as geopolitics allow (looking at you, Germany) and as the Kremlin loves to play the “favour bank” game you can deposit a lot of credits for use later by sending someone pretty senior to SPIEF. Just how senior, and how public you are, is a very tricky decision: to panel or not to panel is the question.

But for the Arabs and Indians it’s a no-brainer. Last year Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was a co-host and Egypt had by far the biggest pavilion on the site, which tells you a lot about Russia’s toehold in North Africa.

Notably this year Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev will not go, after he caused waves last year by telling Putin to his face, on stage, in the plenary session, that Kazakh didn’t recognise the independence of the two Donbas “People’s Republics”. Central Asia is really caught between a rock and a hard place on sanctions. Tokayev is messaging to the White House to keep OFAC off his back. But Kazakhstan’s trade with Russia has tripled and it is in talks to set up a gas hub, so it’s almost certain that Putin will forgive this gesture.

In short, this event is less about the panel debates, and all about the opportunity to message. Having said that, you should pay attention to the economics session with CBR Governor Elvira Nabiullina, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and presidential advisor Maxim Oreshkin. That one is hard core, as that team runs Russia’s economy and it is a no-nonsense assessment of the state of the Russian economy, with a usually highly accurate forecast of where it's going. Short version: Siluanov will stick to his 2% federal budget deficit target for this year; Nabiullina will tell us inflation will rise this year to about 6%, but fall to 4% next year; and all of them will give a really interesting drill down into what challenges the Russian economy still faces.