War in Ukraine will have significant global consequences, especially for neighboring states - IMF chief

This was stated in an interview with CBS by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, informs Espresso.TV.

“If you look at the total volume of banking operations in Russia, it is about one hundred and twenty billion dollars. You can’t call it a worthless value, but certainly the figure is not systemically significant… But the war in Ukraine has social consequences for many, many countries because of three indicators, which have already proven their effectiveness. Firstly, the prices of commodities, energy, grains, fertilizers, metals, the impact on inflation and in countries where inflation was already high", she said.

In addition, the war in Ukraine means famine in Africa. It will also significantly affect the Central Asian republics neighboring Russia and Ukraine, the Caucasus, Moldova, because they have more trade relations with Russia and Ukraine than with the rest of the world.

"Due to the outflow of people, the wave of refugees in Europe is comparable in scale to what happened during the Second World War. So the impact is most significant there. In addition to immediate neighbors, there are two groups of countries that are of great concern to us. The first group is countries which have not yet recovered from the economic crisis caused by COVID. For them, this shock is especially painful. And the second group of countries are those that are more dependent on energy imports from Russia, because there the impact on consumption, as well as on inflation, will be more noticeable", Georgieva added.