“What recommendations does the IMF want to give Russia at the end of the consultation? How to better run a war economy?” one senior eurozone official told Reuters.
Tim Ash, a Russia analyst at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, said in a blogpost: “Clearly while article IV reviews are about surveillance they are also about providing policy advice to countries as to where they are going wrong and trying to provide advice as how to improve their economic outturns.
“Inevitably therefore IMF officials, in making the trip to Moscow, will be helping Russia improve its economy and by so doing will be leaving themselves open to being accused of helping Russia in the conduct of the war against Ukraine.”
Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “A basic requirement for IMF membership is data transparency, which Russia clearly no longer satisfies on a number of fronts.
“Russia has stopped publishing lots of data and there are questions around whether the data it continues to publish are accurate.”
Brooks said the Kremlin was publishing trade figures that showed low income from oil produced in the Urals, even though the price of Russian oil has remained “quite elevated”. It meant the current account, which measures the net effect of trade and financial flows, would disguise the size of Russia’s war chest.
“Russia should be suspended from the IMF while these data questions persist,” he said.