Russia: debt owed to China

The estimated stock, 2000 to 2021

The largest single-year move in the estimated stock is 2013, when it rose by $14.04bn.

Source: Horn, Reinhart and Trebesch, China’s Overseas Lending. Selection: estimated stock owed to China by Russia, by year and instrument, 2000 to 2021. Zeros are estimated zeros (no known loans outstanding), not missing values. Methodology

Historical loan records from the 2021 release

These records come from the 2021 HRT Mendeley replication release, not the November 2025 refreshed stock panel charted above. The refresh uses the updated Franz, Horn, Parks, Reinhart and Trebesch methodology, so this table cannot be reconciled to the chart. The earlier release marks 15 loan-level records for Russia as part of its debt-estimate sample, spanning 2005 to 2017. Comparable commitments are available for 15 of those loans and sum to $83.76bn. These are gross commitments, not outstanding debt stocks. The stock methodology applies disbursement and amortisation profiles, with imputation where loan terms are missing, so the commitment sum must not be compared with the stock above. See the methodology. Terms are sparse by source: interest rate appears on 3 loans, grace period on 2, maturity on 3, any of the three on 3, and all three together on 2. The earlier file also carries 4 additional project rows for Russia outside that sample, so they are not included in this table.

Source: Horn, Reinhart and Trebesch, China’s Overseas Lending (2021 Mendeley replication loan file). Selection: 2021 replication loan records mapped to Russia and flagged DebtEstimateSample = 1 in that release. This is an earlier source universe, not the records used for the November 2025 refreshed stock panel. CommitmentUSD is a gross commitment flow and is not comparable to the charted stock. Commitment stays in its source currency, and ProjectDescription is rendered as free-text data from the file. Methodology

Against what Russia reports owing to all creditors

No comparison is possible. Russia has no row in the World Bank International Debt Statistics table. There is no reported all-creditor stock to measure the China estimate against, so the ratio is n/a, not zero and not a hundred percent. This is a difference in the scope of the two datasets, not evidence of anything hidden. The two-sources page lists every borrower in this position.

People’s Bank of China swap drawings

Russia carried a drawn swap balance in 4 years of the panel, peaking at $176m. A drawing is a liability to another central bank, and it is not netted out of a headline gross reserves figure.

Source: Horn, Reinhart and Trebesch, China’s Overseas Lending. Selection: every year in which Russia carried a drawn PBoC swap-line balance above zero. Methodology

The same balance measured against gross international reserves, for every country that has drawn