The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will send its first mission to Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the IMF’s Russian Executive Director Aleksei Mozhin confirmed to Reuters on Sept. 3. The mission, which will be headed by Argentine economist Jacques Miniane, will begin in an online format and then include a visit to Moscow from an IMF delegation in October. The last IMF mission to Russia was in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. “We were excluded from this process under pressure from our Western ‘friends,’ and there were no further missions in 2022-23,” Mozh…