OREANDA-NEWS The International Monetary Fund predicts a slowdown in the growth of the Russian economy in 2025 to 0.9% amid lower oil prices and tighter policies, Petya Koeva-Brooks, deputy director of the fund's research department, said on Tuesday.

The IMF lowered its forecast for Russia's economic growth in 2025 to 0.9%, and raised it to 1% for 2026, according to the fund's report published earlier on Tuesday.

"We expect Russia's economic growth to slow down in 2025, and this is largely due to policy tightening and lower oil prices," Koeva-Brooks said during a briefing.

She noted that the current estimate is 0.6 percentage points lower than the previous forecast. "This decrease reflects a redistribution of growth rates: the economic recovery was higher than expected in the fourth quarter of 2024, which led to an increase in the forecast for that period, but the dynamics were weaker at the beginning of 2025," Koeva-Brooks explained.

The current forecast of the Ministry of Economic Development assumes that Russia's GDP will grow by 2.5% this year and by 2.4% in 2026. The Bank of Russia expects the country's GDP to grow in the range of 1-2% for the current year, indicating that the economy continues to return to a balanced growth trajectory. In 2026, the Central Bank expects Russia's GDP to grow by 1.5-2.5%.

Russia's GDP in 2024, according to Rosstat estimates, grew by 4.3%.