Russia Financial News

 

Across the world, food prices are rising. But because households in lower-income countries typically spend a higher percentage of their income on food, the pain in those regions is often more extreme.Many agricultural prices soared in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an agricultural heavyweight. Prices have fallen more recently, but lower costs won’t show up in grocery stores or market stalls for months.

Britons living in Portugal are complaining of being deprived of access to basic rights such as healthcare, employment and social security because they have not been issued with post-Brexit residency cards.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has called for the end of military operations around Europe's largest nuclear plant.

A beluga whale which strayed into France's River Seine was still not feeding on Sunday and showed signs of illness, leaving "little hope" for a successful outcome, experts said.

Ukraine's state nuclear power company said on Sunday that a worker was wounded when Russian forces again shelled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Saturday evening.

Five cargo ships loaded with grain were due to set sail on Sunday from the Ukrainian ports of Chernomorsk and Odesa to continue exporting grain, the body overseeing the operation said on Saturday evening.

Sirens sounded and explosions were heard on the western outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, signalling longer-range Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel as its military continued air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

Toretsk is on the frontline of Ukraine's war with Russia, yet all around you can see cyclists pedalling around the streets, going about their daily business as if defying the surrounding danger. 

The French government has set up a crisis team to tackle a historic drought that has left more than 100 municipalities short of drinking water. 

Here are five latest developments to know about in Russia's war against Ukraine this Saturday.

A coach carrying pilgrims to a shrine in Bosnia crashed in northern Croatia early on Saturday, killing at least 12 people and injuring several others according to the authorities.

Taiwan said Saturday that China’s military drills appear to simulate an attack on the self-ruled island, after multiple Chinese warships and aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei that infuriated Beijing.

The head of Amnesty International in Ukraine, Oksana Pokalchuk, has resigned after the NGO published a report blaming the Ukrainian armed forces for endangering civilians.

Israel unleashed a wave of airstrikes in Gaza on Friday, killing at least 10 people, including a senior militant, and wounding dozens, according to Palestinian officials. 

Outrage in Kyiv after Amnesty accuses it of endangering civilian life

Moscow is looking for a deal to strengthen economic cooperation with Ankara, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday as he hosted his counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the southern city of Sochi. 

A British model has questioned whether racism is at play over the Spanish government's failure to apologise for her face being used in a body positivism campaign.

A large blaze in a Berlin forest that was accompanied by several explosions at an ammunition site is now contained, say firefighters. 

Italy's controversial former interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has tried to put migration on the agenda ahead of the country's snap election next month. 

While domestic digital payment usage surged during the pandemic, the EIU expects this to slow over the next five years, largely owing to strong base effects. However, customers are increasingly demanding a similar revolution in cross-border payments, which are still mostly facilitated by the "old-fashioned" and "cumbersome" correspondent banking network. At the centre of this is Swift, which the paper notes has "encountered criticism for its relative inflexibility and lack of transparency" and seen a decline in the number of correspondent banking relationships over the last decade. More recently, Russian has been kicked off the Swift network, a move which could see the country and others such as China and India double down on their nascent Swift alternatives. Nevertheless, the paper says "setting up and scaling a full-fledged alternative bank-messaging system would be expensive and time consuming. It would also have limited real-world impact, given the prevalence of dollar-denominated cross-border flows. Swift will remain the dominant network, as long as countries and lenders come together to improve the Belgian network." Separately, cross-border payments will be disrupted by government-backed efforts to link systems. In Asia, moves are already underway to do this, allowing travellers across the region to purchase goods and services by scanning QR codes. As well as challenging Swift, disrupting cross-border payments will mean adopting emerging technologies, including blockchain, APIs and tokenisation, says the EIU.