It is the first time this has happened since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
IMF officials will publish an assessment of the Russian economy and make recommendations on how the Kremlin can improve its management of the economy and tackle problems such as the climate crisis.
The IMF has said that conducting an Article IV review of a member country is a "mutual obligation" and the process is only on hold due to the volatility of economic data.
On September 13, 9 European countries protested the IMF's plans, saying that resuming dialogue with a country that has invaded another would damage the international organization's reputation.
The IMF suspended its annual consultations with Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine.
"We would like to express our strong dissatisfaction with these IMF plans," the finance ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Poland said in a letter to IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva
Tim Ash, Russia analyst at think tank Chatham House, said in a blog post:
"It is clear that while Article IV reviews are about monitoring, they are also about providing policy advice to countries on where they are going wrong and trying to provide advice on how to improve their economic performance."
"Therefore, by traveling to Moscow, IMF staff will inevitably be helping Russia improve its economy and thus leave themselves open to the charge that they are helping Russia wage war against Ukraine," Ash added.
According to the latest data from the Federal State Statistics Service in Moscow, Russia's economy grew by 4% year-on-year in the second quarter.
Much of the growth, however, was in the manufacturing sector, where factory output is increasingly devoted to the country's war effort.
Consumer spending is believed to have fallen by up to 10%, but there is not enough reliable data to make an estimate. Russia's trade with many countries is also disguised to avoid sanctions, hampering efforts to estimate how much foreign revenue Moscow has accrued.
Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said:
"A key requirement for IMF membership is data transparency, which Russia no longer meets in a number of aspects. Russia has stopped publishing a lot of data and there are questions about whether the data it continues to publish is accurate."
An analysis by economists at Bloomberg said that while government subsidies have cushioned the impact of domestic businesses against sanctions imposed by the US and EU, and higher benefits have supported household spending, growth is likely to slow for the rest of the year. | BGNES
