Page 71 - RusRPTJan21

The other notable trade partner is Ukraine, where, unsurprisingly, the trade turnover has collapsed by three quarters in the last year. Russia exported $15.8bn worth of goods and services to Ukraine in January 2019, which fell to $7.3bn in January 2020 before falling again to $4.3bn in November.
However, imports to Russia from Ukraine have not fallen as hard, although they were half the level of exports to Russia from Ukraine to begin with: Russia imported $5.8bn worth of goods and services from Ukraine in January 2019, which fell modestly to $5.1bn by January 2020, before falling further as the crises of this year unfolded to end at $3.7bn in November 2020.
The upshot is the trade deficit that Ukraine runs with Russia has been more than halved from $10bn a month in January 2019 to $4.4bn in November 2020.
The roughly $2bn of exports per month Ukraine has lost after the restrictions on trade placed on Russian goods have been made up by a rapidly diversifying set of new trade relations the country has built up over the last six years, with a growing trade relation with China being the most important. The lost $6bn of imports per month from Russia have for the most part been replaced with imports from the EU.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Russia’s trade with the UK has been improved by the crisis of 2020. While the trade surplus with Germany has been hit hard in 2020, the trade with the UK has actually expanded rapidly over the year.
Exports by Russia to the UK were running at a steady $10bn a month in 2019 but started to grow at the end of the year to finish at $14bn in December 2019. At the same time At the same time imports from the UK to Russia were running at only $4.2bn in January 2019 and stayed at that at that level all year, leaving Russia with a circa $10bn a month trade surplus.
But in 2020, despite the crisis, exports grew by a quarter ending with $22bn by November 2020 against the same $3.5bn the UK has been selling to Russia each month for the last two years, which translates into a whopping $18.5bn trade surplus in Russia’s favour.
The increase in exports to the UK is probably due to a combination of agricultural exports to the UK growing as Russia pushes its expanding grain export business and also a function of Brexit as the UK looks for new trade deals.
71 ​RUSSIA Country Report​ January 2021 ​ ​www.intellinews.com