Ukraine war latest: Third round of Russian-Ukrainian talks ends without breakthrough

JPMorgan Chase announced it would remove Russian debt from its widely-used bond indices in the latest move to exclude the country from the global financial system since Vladimir Putin went to war with Ukraine.

The bank will pull Russian sovereign and corporate bonds from all of its fixed-income indices from March 31, following similar announcements from index providers including MSCIS&P Dow Jones Indices and FTSE Russell.

The imposition of sanctions on Russia has rendered its debt illiquid and virtually uninvestable, and has pushed many of its bonds towards default.

Critically, the decision will exclude Russian bonds from JPMorgan’s “hard currency” corporate and sovereign indices as well as its index for debt in emerging market currencies.

JPMorgan’s emerging markets indices are among the most closely followed by investors in the fixed-income asset class and serve as an industry benchmark.

Russian and Belarusian debt will also be excluded from its emerging market indices that follow environmental, social and governance criteria.

Pramol Dhawan, head of emerging market portfolio management at Pimco, said he had expected Russia to be excluded because it “does not meet the tradability or liquidity criteria that the index has”.

Russia makes up 0.83 per cent of the JPMorgan Emerging Markets Bond Index, which is tracked by about $ 415bn in assets. The exclusion itself is unlikely to have an effect on the value of the index.

PricingDirect, a service which prices JPMorgan’s indices, has been steadily lowering the value of Russia’s bonds.

Read more on JPMorgan’s decision here