"Circus On Wheels": Putin Humiliated At The Economic Forum

The event was ignored by Western companies, BRICS leaders and most Russian billionaires.

The regular St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which kicked off with pomp on Wednesday, turned out to be of no interest to major international companies, leaders of key "Russia-friendly" countries and the majority of the richest Russians who control key assets of the economy.

As Financial Times reports with reference to the SPIEF-2025 program, not a single Western company sent its representatives to St. Petersburg, and only six of the top 50 billionaires of the Russian Forbes list came to the forum. The heads of Rosneft and Gazprom Igor Sechin and Alexei Miller ignored the event.

The guests of the forum, which is annually visited by President Vladimir Putin, have at different times been German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, French Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron, Chinese Presidents Hu Jintao and Si Jinping.

This time only Indonesian President Prabobo Subianto came to see Putin. And Russia's key trading partners either didn't notice SPIEF or sent second-tier officials: China - Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, South Africa - Vice President Paul Mashatile. The main foreign delegation was Bahrain, which sent Sheikh Nasser al-Khalifa - third in line to the royal throne

Previously known as "Russian Davos," where multibillion-dollar deals were made, SPIEF has degenerated into a propaganda show. "It's still the same circus on wheels," notes Alexandra Prokopenko, an expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

"No one is talking about any investments, because how will you invest in Russia with this climate - war, sanctions, slowing growth and steady inflation? - Prokopenko argues. - The main goal of the forum is to show Putin that the economy is not stagnating, that everyone is having fun doing business as usual."

In the past, major international agreements have been concluded at SPIEF. In 2013, Rosneft signed a $270 billion oil supply agreement with China's SNPC. In 2017, Germany's Linde Group agreed at the forum to invest $10 billion in the construction of a petrochemical complex in Tatarstan, and a year earlier, Gazprom agreed with European energy majors to build the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline.

Now, instead of investment bankers and international experts, the forum speakers were the children of Kremlin politburo officials: Putin's daughter Ekaterina Tikhonova and 25-year-old son Alexander Vaino - the son of the head of the presidential administration Anton Vaino. And among the stands was an exposition of awards of Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, the father of the Russian president. The stand was created by the Christian House of Family Traditions, which last year brought Putin's genealogical tree to the forum.

Last year, former Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu's daughter Ksenia and eccentric philosopher Alexander Dugin, an ideologue of the "Russian world," spoke at SPIEF, while Putin's guests included Zimbabwean President Mnanagwa, Bolivian President Luis Catacora and Aslan Bzhania, the "president" of unrecognized Abkhazia.

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