Russia’s central bank announced that its gold reserves exceeded $310 billion for the first time on December 1, 2025, driven by soaring gold prices and strategic accumulation efforts. This marks a 3.6% increase from the previous month, solidifying the nation’s financial buffers.
Amid geopolitical tensions and sanctions, Russia has ramped up gold holdings to diversify from dollar assets, now comprising 42% of reserves and enhancing economic stability against global uncertainties.
Russia Increases Funding for Global South Despite Deepening Budget Crisis
Published:
6 Dec / 2025
17:09
Illustrative photo: Photo: gettyimages.com
Russia has sharply expanded its external lending despite worsening budget problems and stagnant domestic demand. Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service reported this, according to UATV English.
Over the past year, Moscow increased financing for Bangladesh, India,
and Egypt by a total of another $3 billion:
Bangladesh’s debt grew by
$1.3 billion,
India’s by $800 million, and
Egypt’s by the same amount.
Belarus’s debt to Russia has reached $7.6 billion.
At the same time, the Kremlin is expanding its practice of debt
write-offs:
Tajikistan had $300 million cancelled;
Cuba received a
deferral on a €1.2 billion loan;
Belarus was granted a 7–12 year
extension;
Guinea-Bissau had $26.7 million written off and another
$940,000 restructured;
Somalia was allowed not to repay $691 million. In
total,
Moscow has forgiven around $20 billion to African states.
The contrast with the domestic situation is increasingly stark.
Russian consumers are cutting back on essential purchases:
58% are
giving up goods they previously bought,
57% are switching to cheaper
alternatives, and
46% are trying to visit shops as rarely as possible.
The share of citizens who do not have enough money for food remains at
31%.
Meanwhile, the government is failing to meet its key tax collection
targets: by year’s end, the federal budget will fall short by 5 trillion
rubles across seven major revenue categories that together generate
half of the treasury’s income.
Despite this, the Kremlin is increasing military spending to record
levels. The army and armaments will receive 12.93 trillion rubles —
nearly 30% of the budget, the highest share since Soviet times. Another
3.91 trillion rubles will go to national security. In total, Russia’s
security services and military structures will receive 16.84 trillion
rubles, or 38% of the budget — 1.6 times more than in 2021.
The cost of such priorities is clear:
social spending is being
reduced to 25.1% from the pre-war 38.1%, and
economic support to 10.9%
from 17.6%.
Both figures will fall to their lowest level in 20 years.
“While millions of Russians cut spending and avoid shops, the state
is directing record resources toward war and financial support for
foreign regimes — funds that are unlikely ever to be returned,”
-- the
intelligence service noted.
As reported by Ukrinform, Russia did not sign a single interstate agreement following the investment forum in Moscow.
You’ve Never Seen a James Bond Spy Movie Quite Like This
SO SHAKEN, SO STIRRED
“Reflection in a Dead Diamond” is the wildest thriller of the fall.
Nick Schager is an Entertainment Critic for The Daily Beast, covering
everything great (and not-so-great) in the worlds of film, TV, music,
and pop culture. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism, his work has also appeared in
Variety, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Vulture and dozens of other entertainment publications.Send him tips: tips@thedailybeast.com.
The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism is made possible by our subscribers. Become one today »
With “The New Yorker at 100” documentary now out on Netflix and Richard Brody and Justin Chang releasing their lists of the best movies of the year, there’s a lot to watch today! Plus:
David Remnick in “The New Yorker at 100.” Photograph courtesy Netflix
Hannah Jocelyn Newsletter editor
We’ve been celebrating our centenary all year, and today’s festivities involve “The New Yorker at 100,” a new documentary that is now streaming on Netflix.
Directed by Marshall Curry, the film explores how the
hundredth-anniversary issue came together—following reporters, editors,
cartoonists, covers editors, and fact checkers as they do their work—and
what has defined each of the magazine’s past ten decades. The result is
a view of The New Yorker both contemporary and historical.
At
this year’s New Yorker Festival, Curry and Judd Apatow (an executive
producer) sat down with our staff writer Jelani Cobb to talk about how
they condensed a hundred years into a ninety-minute movie. “That was
definitely a challenge,” Curry told Cobb. “You’ve got this unbelievable
magazine—even just getting a tiny fraction of the current writers was
impossible.” The project, Curry said, “is intended to be a celebration
of that hard, underappreciated work” done by journalists.
The
film ends on a rather exciting note: a montage, set to a
never-before-heard cover of a Taylor Swift song. Below, in an excerpt of
their conversation, the film’s creators discuss exactly how they landed
Swift’s O.K. for the soundtrack. Read the entire chat here.
Curry:
One other anecdote was that, as we were finishing the film, we needed a
song for the final sequence. And we needed something that was New
York-themed, but it needed to have, like, a dynamic range that could
both sort of sit underneath David Remnick talking about the importance
of the magazine and also under party footage, and then would have a
little punch when you go to the credits that would say “New York.”
And
we were trying all of these different songs, and I texted Kelefa
Sanneh, the brilliant music mind, who’s featured in the film, and I
said, “Do you have any ideas for a New York song that would work?” And
he said, “What if you got someone like Matt Berninger from the
National,” this sort of cool indie-rock band, “to record Taylor Swift’s
‘Welcome to New York’?”
And he didn’t know, but I’m super good friends with Matt Berninger, and Matt’s wife was a fiction editor at The New Yorker.
And I’d been talking to Matt as well—like, “Can you think of any
songs?” So I called him, and said, “Hey, I just had this idea—would you
be willing to do this?” And he said, “The problem is”—we were talking on
a Saturday—“the day after tomorrow, I’m going to California to rehearse
to go on tour. But tomorrow, I could go into a studio and record the
song.” But he said, “I don’t know if Taylor Swift’s going to let you use
the song. You know, she’s Taylor Swift.”
And
so he said, “I’ll record it; if you can get the rights, then you can
use it; if not, then whatever.” And so he recorded the song, he sent it
to me the next day, we cut it into the film, it was perfect—it had all
that fun dynamic range, it was cool, it was smart, it was poppy.
I write Taylor Swift an e-mail; two days later, she says, “Sure,” and, you know—
Apatow: How do you have her e-mail?!
Cobb: It’s, like, Taylor Swift never replies to my e-mails. [Laughter.]
Curry: So that’s the song at the end of the movie. It’s an unreleased version of Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.”
Justin Chang and Richard Brody
don’t agree on everything, but, when it comes to their favorite movies
of the year, they find some overlap. They both selected Richard
Linklater’s “Blue Moon” and Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick
You,” among others. Generally, Chang noticed that, on his list, “even in
the context of a crackerjack entertainment,” questions of moral and
political legacy arise. For Brody, his top choices “have brought
old-fashioned, sensory spectacle back to the movies.” Read the lists »
How Bad Is It?
An advisory panel
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has voted to stop
recommending universal at-birth hepatitis-B shots. Under its new
guidelines, babies whose mothers have tested positive for the virus will
still receive the vaccine, but the shot would be delayed by two months
if mothers test negative.
How bad is it?
“The
big problem is that the negative test results may not always be
correct, and that the United States has never had a health-care system
where everyone has good access to prenatal and maternity care.
“The
decades-old public-health policy to vaccinate all newborns against
hepatitis B has been spectacularly effective, with no scientific
evidence of harm. Today’s vote from the shambolic meeting of the federal
Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices sets us up for needless
tragedy. People will likely die, but the full effects of this policy
reversal, if adopted, won’t be felt for decades. That’s because a
chronic hep-B infection can silently foster liver disease and cancer
later in life. Today’s recommendation stands to damage the public-health
safety net, and babies who are vulnerable are the ones to suffer.”
— Ingfei Chen, a reporter who covers public health.
The outcry grows over Trump's undeclared war in the Caribbean.
By Susan B. Glasser
Dynasty Dept.
Mamdani Family Values
Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father, just published his twelfth book. The subject? Dictators.
By Jake Offenhartz
Screening Room
Building a State of Fear in “Extremist”
Alexander
Molochnikov’s short film reinterprets an act of protest that called
attention to the invasion of Ukraine, and led to the imprisonment of
Sasha Skochilenko, a young Russian artist, in 2023.
Film by Alexander Molochnikov
Text by Joshua Yaffa
Our Culture Picks
Read: The internet is obsessed with performative reading. May we suggest David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” if you want to give it a go?
Watch: “Jay Kelly,” starring George Clooney, is also out on Netflix today. The director, Noah Baumbach, has a way of “finding the sharp edges in soft material.”
.gif)
.gif)
