Russian Presidential foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov (L) attends a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Republic of the Congo President Denis Sassou N'guesso at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Russia, 29 April 2026. EPA/PAVEL BEDNYAKOV / POOL Russia's economy, which contracted in 2022 but grew in 2023, 2024 and 2025, has outperformed most expectations and avoided a crash which Western powers had hoped to stoke by piling on the most onerous sanctions ever imposed on a major economy.
But just weeks after Putin announced a contraction in the first two months of 2025, the Economy Ministry said the overall figures for the first quarter of this year would be a contraction of 0.3%, less than many economists feared.
"This is an expected process," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday when asked about the economic data by Reuters. "The expected cooling-down process of the economy has taken place."
"The government and the president are taking measures and developing solutions aimed at changing this negative trend into an upward trend," Peskov said.
Russia's economy shrank by 1.4% in 2022, but expanded by 4.1% in 2023 and 4.9% in 2024. It grew only 1% last year and Moscow's official forecast for this year is 1.3%.
After a rate-setting meeting last week, the central bank said that the decline this year was largely driven by one-off factors such as a hike in value-added tax at the start of the year and heavy snowfall that slowed construction.
Other Russian officials and business leaders blamed labour shortages and slow implementation of new technologies as well as the strong rouble for the contraction, which appeared to come as a surprise for the Kremlin.
Russian central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina called for honesty in economic data on Tuesday, after Western intelligence agencies made allegations about the quality of Russian data and hinted at manipulation by the authorities.
Asked if the Kremlin had confidence in the published economic statistics, Peskov said: "Absolutely".
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov, Writing by Anna Peverieri and Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Mark Trevelyan)