Putin cancels Kyrgyzstan's debt of $240 million
President Vladimir Putin signed a bill on the ratification of an agreement between the governments of Russia and Kyrgyzstan on the settlement of the latter's debts on loans.
The agreement writes off the remainder of Kyrgyzstan’s debt totaling $ 240 million. Russia already wrote off the first part of the debt, $188.9 million back in 2013. Nevertheless, Kyrgyzstan still owed $300 million.
Since Kyrgyzstan was not able to repay the debt, the countries agreed to write it off by $30 million a year. By May 2017, when it was proposed to write off the Kyrgyz debt in full, only $60 million was written off.
"They requested that we write off the debt. We met our partners halfway and today an agreement was signed to write off the debt in the amount of $240 million," Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said.
According to media reports, in 2016, Putin wrote off Uzbekistan's debt for $865 million. Before that, the debts of Mongolia, Afghanistan and Libya were written off for a total of more than $16 billion.
In August 2017, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation reported that Moscow repaid the last foreign debt of the USSR, paying $125.2 million to Bosnia and Herzegovina.