Wounded bear

摘要

As PR exercises go, Russia's first US dollar bond issue in nearly three years was a failure. The deal was supposed to be a two-fingered salute to the Western governments that imposed sanctions two years ago. The best that can be said is that Russia got a deal done. But from Moscow's point of view, the ideal transaction would have had support from some big international banks - and significant interest from Western institutional investors. And yet there was no foreign bank as a lead. State-owned bank VTB Capital ran the transaction alone.