Still during Monday morning, tensions on the Russian-Ukrainian border appeared to have topped as the Biden-Putin summit began to loom. But Moscow’s afternoon news of the killing of five Ukrainian soldiers on Russian territory sent markets into the red.
The Moscow stock exchange has seen the biggest ever slump. The RTS aggregate index there eventually plunged more than 13 percent. Over the past five days, the loss of shares traded on the Moscow Stock Exchange is more than 17 percent.
Bad sentiment has also begun to spill over into Central and Western European markets. The Budapest Stock Exchange recorded the biggest ever decline, up 3.52 percent. This was followed by the stock exchange in Warsaw (3,44) and Vienna (2,23). Over two percent lost the Frankfurt Stock Exchange’s DAX index and the CAC 40 index in Paris. Just 0.39 percent was written off by the London Stock Exchange as measured by the FTSE 100 index.
Above the morning of Central European time, stocks in Asia were also weakening. Here, Tokyo’s Nikkei index fell most, admittedly 0.78 percent. Followed by the Hang Seng (down 0.65 percent), Shanghai stagnated. US stock index futures, which were losing in the one to two per cent range, also responded to the worsening situation in Ukraine.
