Red Square in Moscow. Some investors are betting on a potential Russian return to the global financial markets if the war in Ukraine ends.
Photographer: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Images
莫斯科的红场。一些投资者押注于如果乌克兰战争结束，俄罗斯可能重返全球金融市场。摄影师：亚历山大·泽姆利亚尼琴科/AP 图片
Global Investors Make a Risky Bet on Russia’s Return to Markets
全球投资者对俄罗斯重返市场进行冒险投资
It's a massive geopolitical gamble that could yet backfire.
这是一场巨大的地缘政治赌博，可能会适得其反。
Traders at one London brokerage have been scouring the financial world in recent weeks for an asset almost untouchable for the past three years: Russian debt. They have been racing to find owners of dollar-denominated bonds issued by Gazprom to meet demand from Middle Eastern family offices.
伦敦一家经纪公司的交易员们在最近几周一直在金融市场上寻找一种在过去三年几乎无法触及的资产：俄罗斯债务。他们正在争相寻找持有由俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司（Gazprom）发行的美元计价债券的投资者，以满足中东家族办公室的需求。
They quickly found the Russian energy behemoth’s bondholders were either unwilling to sell or demanding significantly higher prices, according to two traders who spoke on condition that neither they nor the firm were identified because of the sensitivity of the transactions. This combination of limited supply and growing demand helped to drive down yields on dollar and euro-denominated Russian bonds by about five percentage points in February, one of the traders estimated.
根据两位交易员的说法，他们在交易敏感性要求下不愿透露身份，迅速发现俄罗斯能源巨头的债券持有人要么不愿意出售，要么要求显著更高的价格。这种有限供应和日益增长的需求的结合，帮助在二月份将以美元和欧元计价的俄罗斯债券收益率降低了约五个百分点。
Big Take 大要点
Investors Eye a Return to Russia
投资者关注俄罗斯的回归
Follow The Big Take daily podcast wherever you listen.
在您收听的任何地方关注《The Big Take》每日播客。
The transactions — revealed here for the first time — are among the clearest indications yet that investors are quietly betting that US President Donald Trump’s overtures to Moscow for a deal to end the war in Ukraine will eventually translate into Russia’s return to the global financial markets. The buyers are wagering that the deeply discounted securities could soar in value if the sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are lifted.
这些交易——首次在此披露——是迄今为止最清晰的迹象之一，表明投资者正在悄然押注美国总统唐纳德·特朗普对莫斯科的接触，认为达成结束乌克兰战争的协议最终将转化为俄罗斯重返全球金融市场。买家们押注，如果在 2022 年俄罗斯入侵乌克兰后对其实施的制裁被解除，深度折价的证券可能会飙升。
Investors “understand that as soon as there’s a thaw, these discounts will collapse,” said Iskander Lutsko, Dubai-based head of research and portfolio management at Istar Capital, an investment firm and wealth manager with about $1 billion under management.
投资者“明白一旦局势缓和，这些折扣就会崩溃，”伊斯坎德尔·卢茨科说，他是 Istar Capital 的研究和投资组合管理负责人，该公司是一家总部位于迪拜的投资公司和财富管理公司，管理着约 10 亿美元的资产。
Money managers, too, say they are receiving approaches from Wall Street sales teams gauging their interest in making bets on the ruble through non-deliverable forwards — derivatives that because they don’t involve a physical Russian asset or individual person aren’t subject to sanctions. The Russian currency has gained 13 percent against the dollar since the start of the year, according to Bank of Russia data.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among banks that have been acting as brokers to facilitate growing investor demand for ways to trade Russian-related assets, people familiar with the matter said.
高盛集团和摩根大通是一些银行，它们一直充当经纪人，以促进日益增长的投资者对交易与俄罗斯相关资产的需求，知情人士表示。
“There’s an aggressive search for securities of Russian issuers around the world,” said Evgeny Kogan, a Moscow-based investment banker who runs his own advisory firm. “Investors in general are asking how quickly they can enter the Russian market.”
“全球范围内对俄罗斯发行人证券的搜索非常积极，”莫斯科的投资银行家、自己经营顾问公司的 Evgeny Kogan 说。“投资者普遍在询问他们能多快进入俄罗斯市场。”
2024 年 5 月 7 日，弗拉基米尔·普京总统在莫斯科克里姆林宫参加就职典礼。摄影师：谢尔盖·博比洛夫/法新社/盖蒂图片社
Both sides of the bet represent a massive geopolitical gamble. At stake in the rehabilitation of Russia are hundreds of billions of dollars in trade and investment opportunities through the easing or removal of sanctions by the US and its Group of Seven allies. President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to lure Trump with potential joint US-Russia projects are only adding to the fervor.
这笔赌注的双方代表了一场巨大的地缘政治赌博。俄罗斯的复兴涉及数千亿美元的贸易和投资机会，这些机会将通过美国及其七国集团盟友的制裁缓解或取消而实现。普京总统试图通过潜在的美俄联合项目来吸引特朗普，这只会加剧这种热情。
But these wagers come with multiple risks — reputational if an investor or company moves too early to restore ties with a country responsible for Europe's largest conflict since the Second World War; and legal, if sanctions aren’t lifted or are later re-imposed. On March 7, Trump warned he was “strongly considering” fresh banking sanctions on Russia while still preparing to negotiate to end the conflict.
Read More: Putin Likely to Drag Out Ukraine Truce Talks to Seek Terms
US envoy Steve Witkoff is expected in Moscow this week for discussions over a proposed 30-day truce. But even if Trump succeeds in halting the fighting now, there will remain an unstable, heavily-armed frontline and an ever-present risk of the war reigniting if Putin sees a chance to subjugate all of Ukraine or Kyiv attempts to take back territory left under Russian occupation. Europe is ramping up plans for as much as €800 billion in additional defense spending for this new era of insecurity.
Enormous Hurdles
These tentative moves back into Russian trades come against a volatile political backdrop. Since taking office in January pledging to quickly end the war that Putin started, Trump has turned US relations with Ukraine and Russia on their head — to the delight of Moscow and the horror of Kyiv and its European allies.
The Kremlin was surprised at the intensity of Trump’s engagement with Putin, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. What Moscow most needs is for the US to lift at least some bank restrictions to ease trading in dollars, the person said, asking not to be identified discussing internal issues. That would help overcome growing cross-border payments difficulties for Russian businesses.
Enormous hurdles stand in the way of Russia coming in from the cold. Three years of war unraveled three decades of deepening Western involvement after the Soviet Union’s collapse, that radically reshaped Russia’s economy and outlook. A widening divide between the US and Europe over Ukraine’s defense — a byproduct of the rapprochement between Trump and Putin — threatens the most serious breakdown in relations since World War II. It may even presage a fundamental realignment of global power as Trump reaches out to Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, potentially threatening the NATO alliance that’s been the cornerstone of Western defense for 76 years.
“The liberal rules-based order is under severe strain,” said Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Putin has an alternative vision of a multipolar world divided into great powers. And these great powers have a privileged sphere of influence where they can act with impunity.”
That impunity was brought to life when Trump in February held the first public phone call by a US president with Putin — who remains under an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Ukraine — since the Feb. 2022 invasion. Days later, top US and Kremlin officials held discussions in Saudi Arabia aimed at restoring diplomatic relations.
Russia has changed markedly since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion that has left an estimated 1.2 million people dead and wounded on both sides. Massive state spending on the military and defense production has created a war economy as Russian expectations of victory within days gave way to the reality of Ukrainian resistance backed by billions of dollars in weapons from the US and its allies in NATO. Moscow intends to increase defense spending to 13.2 trillion rubles ($148 billion) this year, putting it at 6.2% of gross domestic product. The government expects spending on defense and domestic security to account for about 40% of total budget expenditure in 2025.
Harder to Get Back in Than it Was to Leave
Despite that enormous spend, years of Kremlin rhetoric condemning the US and European states as “unfriendly” and “toxic” means that Russia may still not be in any hurry to roll out the welcome mat for foreign direct investment, according to people close to the government.
Read More: Consumer Firms With Foot in Russia First Movers Back If War Ends
Moscow imposed harsh terms on Western multinationals that fled after the war began, forcing them to accept stringent haircuts on the value of assets or seizing local subsidiaries before authorizing their sale to Kremlin-approved buyers, often with links to allies of Putin. And it may set conditions on companies seeking to return, according to a person close to the government and a tycoon with links to Putin. A state commission set up to allow the wartime exit of foreign companies from Russia may now be used to approve their return on a selective basis, according to economic need, the scale of investment and the manner in which they left the country in the first place, the person close to the government said.
“It will be as hard for them to return as it was for them to leave,” said Igor Yurgens, a board member of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs that represents major businesses, and a former adviser to Dmitry Medvedev when he was president from 2008-2012. “There’ll be tough conditions on localization and most importantly technology” transfers to modernize production, he said.
Read More: Putin Envoy Dangles Business Ties to Lure US to Ukraine Deal
“It will take time, but step by step, positive economic cooperation across various sectors will resume,” Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and Putin’s special envoy for international economic ties, said on the social media platform X. He’s been tasked by Putin with promoting joint projects with the US as part of Russian efforts to secure favorable terms with Trump in a deal to end the war.
US and Russian officials are already discussing potential economic cooperation in the Arctic, including the exploration of natural resources and trade routes. Dmitriev floated the idea of a joint US-Russia mission to Mars together with Saudi Arabia, and Putin offered to work with “our American partners” to mine Russia’s rare earth metals, saying it has “an order of magnitude more resources of this kind than Ukraine.”
Trump told reporters he’d “like to buy minerals on Russian land” even as he’s dangling the prospect of an agreement with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to exploit Ukraine’s natural resources. “It’s a great thing if we settle — it’s great for Russia too, because we can do deals there,” he added.
Frozen Assets
For now, thousands of companies, state bodies, tycoons and political figures including Putin and most of his top officials remain under sanctions imposed by the US and its allies since the start of the invasion. About $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, mostly in Europe, have been frozen by the US, the European Union, and other G-7 allies. Sanctions on wealthy Russians froze an additional $58 billion in assets, including homes, yachts and private aircraft, according to US Treasury estimates.
Putin has made clear to the tycoons that he won’t lobby on their behalf to get individual sanctions removed, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. It may even suit him for the restrictions to remain so that billionaires are forced to invest at home, one of the people added.
Yet the West never succeeded in completely isolating the Russian economy which was able to expand into new markets. Many commodities companies including in metals, fertilizers and agricultural products avoided sanctions amid fears of disrupting the global economy and Moscow undermined a $60 price cap on oil imposed by the G-7 by delivering crude using a shadow fleet of tankers. In a sign that the sanctions regime on oil exports might already be fraying, crude flows from all Russian ports in the four weeks to March 9 jumped by about 300,000 barrels a day — the biggest gain since January 2023.
When the EU slammed the door on €258 billion of trade as Russia’s biggest pre-war market, rupturing energy imports including gas that met almost 40% of the bloc’s demand in 2021, the Kremlin faced east.
China provided an economic lifeline to Russia as bilateral trade surged, weakening the impact of sanctions. Russia-China trade has jumped by about two-thirds since 2021 to a record $244.8 billion in 2024, customs data in Beijing show. Chinese brands including carmakers replaced foreign multinationals in Russia that scrambled for the exit. Everything from Apple iPhones to luxury Bentley cars also continued to be sold in Russia after the government authorized so-called parallel imports.
Some Russian commodities groups are now worried about overdependence on China and would sell to the US if they had access, according to two top managers in metals holdings. But even if the European market — previously the biggest buyer of Russian metals — reopened, China and other Asian clients have become too important to drop, the people say, asking not to be identified discussing customer issues.
Any possible lifting of sanctions could potentially drive a further wedge between the approaches of the EU and Washington.
Trump has the power to lift US penalties on Russia through executive action. He can simply sign orders to remove penalties on companies and individuals, including Putin, while the EU has to negotiate such decisions among its 27 member states, and may be less open to such moves. But Trump doesn’t have an entirely free hand. Any shift to remove some of the measures imposed by the outgoing Biden administration — including sanctions on Gazprom and a second energy company Surgutneftegas — would trigger a 30-day review period and possible vote in Congress.
Trump could also withdraw from multilateral sanctions on Russia imposed by the US together with its allies. That would weaken enforcement and lead to confusion for businesses navigating a patchwork of restrictions, particularly if the UK and the EU measures remained in place.
“Sanctions may not be lifted right away, but their spirit will fade,” said Boris Titov, Putin’s former business ombudsman and now the special Kremlin representative to international organizations on sustainable development.
It won’t be easy to turn Russia’s war economy back toward “things that are priorities for western investors,” said Emily Ferris, a senior research fellow in the International Security Studies department at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “How could a western investor not be sure that its investment might be used for either the war which is still not finished, or for Russian military rearmament?”