Russia to pay off all of USSR’s foreign debt by end of 2017

Russia will repay all of the Soviet Union’s outstanding foreign debt by the end of 2017, reported newspaper Izvestiya, citing Ministry of Finance officials.

Russia plans to pay off its last debt of 125.2 million dollars to Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a successor of Yugoslavia, in the next few months. An agreement on the repayment of this debt, said the Ministry of Finance, has been written and is ready to be signed. A government source told the publication the debt to Bosnia and Herzegovina would be repaid before summer 2017.

The Finance Ministry, in turn, said that the debt would be repaid before the end of the year, adding that the necessary funds have already been allocated from the federal budget.

On February 10, Russia’s Ministry of Finance announced that it had successfully repaid the $60.6 million the Soviet Union owed to Macedonia. The debt, according to the Ministry, was repaid by deliveries of Russian-made industrial products and the provision of related services.

After repaying Macedonia, the Ministry said then, the only country with whom Russia held unresolved Soviet debt was Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As the legal successor to the Soviet Union, Russia is also engaged in settling the debts that other countries had to the USSR. In 2014, the Russian Federation wrote off 90 percent of Cuba's debt to the USSR, i.e. a whopping $32 billion dollars. Russia also previously wrote off several billion dollars of debt for Iraq, Mongolia, Syria, and Afghanistan, amongst other countries.