Western countries completely dropped out of the ranking of Russia’s top five trade partners in 2023, with China, India, Turkiye, Belarus and Kazakhstan filling out the list and accounting for roughly 60 percent (or $425 billion) of Russia’s total trade last year.
That’s according to a Sputnik analysis of Russian Federal Customs Service and other national statistics office data.
According to the customs, the country’s trade turnover hit the equivalent of $710.1 billion in 2023, 51 percent of that accounted for by countries in Asia, 23 percent by Europe, 11 percent by the Middle East, eight percent by former Soviet republics, four percent by the Americas and three percent by Africa.
China remained the overall leader in trade turnover with Russia, with exports and imports to and from the Asian nation reaching the equivalent of $240.1 billion. India ranked second, with $64.9 billion, after nearly doubling its trade with Russia last year. Trade with Turkiye reached $56.5 billion, while exports and imports to and from Russia’s Union State ally Belarus hit about $55 billion. Kazakhstan rounded out the top five with $26 billion in trade turnover in 2023.
Germany, which had ranked second in overall trade with Russia in 2021 (when exports and imports reached $56.99 billion), dropped out of the top five completely in 2023, with trade amounting to about $12.2 billion, making Germany seventh overall. South Korea, the UAE, Brazil and the Netherlands accounted for the top ten, with $15 billion, $12.1 billion, $11.3 billion and $9.9 billion, respectively.
Russia’s shift away from trade with Western countries in favor of new global trade order with its BRICS+ partners and other developing nations still has room for improvement, with Europe and the US still purchasing billions of dollars-worth of key commodities including natural gas, uranium and metals all the while waging what amounts to a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Still, the downturn in trade with Russia (instigated by Brussels and Washington themselves) has been significant enough to seriously damage Western economies, particularly in Europe. Traditional European industrial powerhouse Germany sunk into recession last year as hundreds of energy-intensive manufacturers fled the country following the loss of cheap and dependable Russian pipeline gas - with the Biden administration doing its best to woo these companies to relocate to the United States through lower energy costs and tax incentives. Italy, the UK and other European followed Germany into a recession in 2023, while others, like the Netherlands and France, barely managed to avoid one.
President Putin warned almost two years ago that European countries’ “suicidal” and “absolutely political” move to halt Russian energy purchases would boomerang against them.
“Rejection of Russian energy resources means that Europe will systematically become the region with the highest energy costs in the world…This will seriously – and according to some experts irrevocably – undermine the competitiveness of a significant part of European industry, which is already losing the competition to companies in other regions,” Putin said in May of 2022. Putin added that he had “the impression that our Western colleagues, politicians and economists have simply forgotten the foundations of the elementary laws of economics, or, to their detriment, prefer to deliberately ignore them”