Russian Foreign Trade in 2022: Imports Recovers

(20 October 2022) In April 2022 Russia’s customs service has decided to temporarily suspend publication of import and export data in order to exclude errors and “speculation”. The move makes it much harder to gauge the impact on trade and economy of sweeping western sanctions.

The main difficulty the Russian economy is currently experiencing is the lack of imported intermediates, electronics and equipment, rather than the ban on use of Russian fossil fuel and other commodities imposed mainly be US, UK and EU. For example, lack of imported auto-parts has had a devastating impact on Russian passenger car assembling industry. For example, in May 2022 production of passenger cars in Russia dropped to almost zero.

In this dashboard Knoema collected latest data on exports to Russia by major trade partners. Foreign trade data shows that while US, UK and EU essentially decreased merchandise exports to Russia, Russian imports from other origins (China, Japan, Korea, India, Belarus, Kazakhstan) has been recovering.