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Sharp drop in EU-Russia trade due to Ukraine war

BRUSSELS, Jan 25 (KUNA) -- European Union's trade with Russia has been strongly affected following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with the EU imposing import and export restrictions on several products.
The EUآ’s trade deficit with Russia, peaked in March 2022 at 19.6 billion euro (USD 21.3 billion). It then progressively decreased and in September 2022 stood at 9.7 billion euro (USD 10.5 billion), Eurostat, the EUآ’s statistical office, reported Wednesday.
The value of EU exports to Russia fell by 47% between February 2022 and March 2022, while imports from Russia rose by 13% in these months due to a sharp increase of the price of energy products and raw materials.
Since then imports from Russia have declined steadily and in September 2022 they had fallen by 33% compared with February 2022.
EU imports of petroleum oil (combined crude and non-crude) from Russia in trade value more than doubled between January 2021 and February 2022 due to increasing prices.
Russia was the largest provider of petroleum oils to the EU in 2021. After Russia's invasion, a major diversion in the trade of petroleum oil took place.
Evidence of this became visible in the second and especially in the third quarter of 2022. From July to September there was a drop of 55 percentage point (pp) in the value of EU imports from Russia, as both prices and volumes fell.
The share of Russian oil export to the EU was equal to 14% in the third quarter of 2022, a decrease of 11 pp compared with 2021. The shares of Saudi Arabia (+4 pp) and the United States (+3 pp) both increased in the third quarter of 2022 compared with 2021.
EU imports of natural gas from Russia increased considerably between January 2021 and March 2022 as prices increased sharply .
In the light of several packages of sanctions imposed by the European Union, the supply of natural gas from Russia steadily decreased with a significant drop from April to June 2022.
The increase of imports between July to September 2022 was thus due to the increase in prices. January 2021, the volume stood at 70% in March 2022 before falling to 44% in September 2022.
Russia's share in EU imports of natural gas dropped from 36 % in 2021 to 18% in the third quarter of 2022.
EU imports of coal from Russia grew considerably between January 2021 and May 2022 due to a sharp increase of prices in this period.
After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, from August 2022, the fifth package of EU sanctions imposed a prohibition to purchase, import or transfer coal and other solid fossil fuels into the EU if they originate in Russia or are exported from Russia.
As a consequence of the ban, the imports of coal have fallen sharply to almost zero in September 2022.
The value of the EU's imports of iron & steel from Russia more than doubled between January 2021 and February 2022 due to rising prices.
Subsequently, a drop in volume was observed in the second quarter of 2022 because of the sanctions on several products. The values imported between July and September 2022 remained almost stable, noted Eurostat. (end) nk.rk