The Impact Of The War Between Russia And Ukraine Made Indonesia Lose 240 Million US Dollars

Illustration (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA – Concerns about the war between Russia and Ukraine that could have a direct impact on Indonesia's economic activity have finally been answered.

The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) reported that there had been a fairly deep trade balance deficit between Indonesia and Russia and Ukraine earlier this year.

Head of BPS Margo Yuwono said that the value of Indonesia's deficit with Russia until April 2022 reached 217.2 million US dollars.

While with Ukraine it is known that it is 23.3 million US dollars. This means that in the first four months of this year, the two countries contributed a trade balance deficit of around USD 240.5 million.

"This shows that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is detrimental to Indonesia, which can be seen from our trade balance for the past four months that we have a deficit," he said while giving a statement to reporters via virtual channels on Tuesday, May 17.

According to Margo, the biggest deficit with Russia will be in March 2022 worth 186.8 million US dollars.

As for Ukraine, the highest minus trade value was in January 2022, which amounted to 8.9 million US dollars.

In fact, he continued, before the war the balance sheet was always in surplus, namely with Russia of 48.3 million US dollars for the January-April 2021 period and of 69 million US dollars with Ukraine at the same time.

"Lately we have a deficit with the two countries, in contrast to last year we still got a surplus from Ukraine and Russia," he stressed.

However, this situation did not significantly affect the performance of Indonesia's trade balance as a whole.

This indication can be seen from the export notch up to April 2022 which amounted to 27.32 billion US dollars, or much higher than the import value of 19.76 billion US dollars.

As a result, Indonesia posted a trade balance surplus of 7.56 billion US dollars.

This figure is the highest in history and continues the positive trend of surplus for 24 consecutive months.