(Bloomberg) — After suffering its longest economic contraction this century, Russia may just have had the shortest recovery. JPMorgan Chase & Co. says the world’s biggest energy exporter probably capped last year with two consecutive quarters of contraction — or a technical recession — a surprise cooldown that ranged from struggling consumer spending to a flop in industrial output. Gross domestic product is still growing relative to a year earlier, with the central bank putting expansion at 1.7 percent to 2.2 percent in 2017 and predicting it will continue at a similar pace in 2018. No official GDP data is yet available past the third quarter.

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“Growth was driven by a number of one-off factors and now these are unwinding,” said Liza Ermolenko, an economist at Barclays Capital in London. “It does look like the output gap is pretty much closed, so there is not a lot of scope for the recovery to continue.” The slip-up, which came against the backdrop of a recovery in oil prices, leaves the economy in a precarious position going into the new year. Although government-led efforts propped up investment in 2017 — with Raiffeisenbank estimating that four state-led projects accounted for more than half of the total in capital spending — some of them will come to an end already this year. While JPMorgan says the “weakness will be transitory,” a letdown so soon after Russia moved past the slump in mid-2015 highlights the dilemma President Vladimir Putin now faces in making the economy a selling point in a campaign for another six-year term in March elections. Despite Russia’s resilience to the twin challenges of cheaper oil and Western sanctions, state development lender Vnesheconombank estimates a drop in GDP accelerated on a monthly seasonally adjusted basis in Sept., Oct. and Nov.

“The Russian economy lost momentum in the second half after a very strong first half,” said JPMorgan analyst Anatoliy Shal. “The extreme weakness of the past couple of months comes as a surprise.”

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