The Swedish government has come up with some drastically different economic figures on Russia that make the Kremlin’s official data seem like a Potemkin village.
In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard cautioned the West against overestimating Russia and said the economy is more fragile than it appears.
While Russia has claimed GDP expanded by about 13% between 2020 and 2024, Sweden’s analysis of nighttime luminosity suggests the economy actually shrank by 8% during that span.
Moscow has also lowballed inflation substantially, according to Stenergard, who pointed out that Russia’s official inflation figure in 2024 was 10% while the central bank hiked interest rates to 21% that year.
Similarly, Sweden’s military intelligence chief has estimated that today’s inflation is likely closer to the current benchmark borrowing cost of 15% than the government’s official reading of 5.2%.
