GDP per capita and its annual growth in EU

Vladimir Putin is serving his fourth term as Russian president. He has now been at the helm for over 22 years, if we factor in his tenure as acting president over the first months of 2000 and his premiership from 2008 to 2012. Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) was on an ascending trend during Putin’s first years in office, but did not reach its 1990 levels until 2006. Later, the global drop in oil prices and the imposition of Western sanctions following the annexation of Crimea pushed Russia into recession between 2014 and 2016. The country had been on a path of recovery since then (except at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic), but economic growth before the war of aggression on Ukraine was still far below what it had been during the first decade under Putin (see Figure 1 for data until 2020; in 2021, Russia’s economic growth bounced back to +4.3 %).