The EU bought almost €30 billion worth of oil and gas from Russia last year

In 2023 , RUSSIA continued to supply hydrocarbons not subject to sanctions to the European Union. EU countries purchased Russianoil , petroleum products and gas worth more than €29 billion, follows from Eurostat statistics

The trade turnover of the European Union countries with Russia in 2023 decreased in value terms by 2.9 times compared to the anomalous year 2022 (at that time world oil prices averaged $100 per barrel, and Russia, despite the beginning of a break in trade ties with the West, earned more €90 billion in sales of oil and petroleum products to European countries). Compared to the “pre-sanction” year of 2021, the turnover of mutual trade between the EU and Russia decreased by 2.8 times. At the end of 2023, imports of Russian goods into 27 EU countries amounted to €50.64 billion, and EU exports to Russia amounted to €38.32 billion, according to statistics published on February 15 by the European agency Eurostat, analyzed by RBC.

Since February 2022, the EU has introduced 12 packages of sanctions against Russia, consistently reducing the volume of permitted trade. The European Commission claims that approximately €147 billion of the “pre-sanction” trade turnover with Russia was subject to the imposed restrictions. “All major commodities are already sanctioned; other major commodities are off limits, such as those related to nuclear energy or LNG,” Politico noted in January 2024 . The EU’s share in Russia’s trade turnover after sanctions decreased by more than half - from 36 to 15%, and with friendly countries increased 1.7 times - from 46 to 77%, Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov said on February 8.

According to the Federal Customs Service (FCS), in 2023, exports of goods from Russia to Europe amounted to $84.9 billion (3.1 times less than in 2022). However, Belarus is classified as Europe, which largely explains the discrepancy, says Alexander Firanchuk, senior researcher at the International Laboratory for Foreign Trade Research at RANEPA. In 2021, Russian exports to Belarus amounted to $22.8 billion and are now probably at about the same level (the publication of FCS statistics for specific countries has been suspended), he points out. “In addition, historically, Russia and Europe counted maritime supplies slightly differently,” adds Firanchuk: for example, Russia could send oil to the Netherlands, and they could ship it to non-European countries; The Netherlands does not count this as an import, but for Russia it is an EXPORT to an EU country. The press service of the Federal Customs Service confirmed that they rely on the all-Russian classifier of countries of the world, in which Belarus belongs to the macro-region “Europe”.

In general, due to a number of factors, statistics in different countries may differ, which makes it quite difficult to get an accurate picture, says Alexander Daniltsev , DIRECTOR of the Institute of Trade Policy at the Higher School of Economics. These include inconsistencies in estimates of customs value, in the timing of registration of exports and imports, discrepancies in the classification of goods, and now the factor of restrictions in access to official statistics has been added to this, he lists.

Continuation of oil and gas supplies

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An analysis of European statistics for 2023 shows that the EU continues to import oil, petroleum products and natural gas from Russia (totalling €29.1 billion), as well as ferrous metals, nickel, aluminum, platinum group metals, fertilizers, and inorganic chemical products ( including nuclear fuel, ammonia, etc.). Of the remaining EU exports to Russia, the largest item is pharmaceutical products (about 23%).

Although at the end of 2022 - beginning of 2023 the European Union introduced an embargo on the import of Russian oil and petroleum products, supplies of Russian pipeline gas and LNG were not affected by the restrictions. However, if in 2021 Russian natural gas, according to the Council of the EU, provided more than 40% of EU gas imports, at the end of 2023 this share decreased to 8% (in particular, this was affected by the stop of supplies via the blown up Nord Stream ). Together with Russian LNG, this share amounted to about 15% of total natural gas imports into the European Union, the EU Council indicates. According to Eurostat, last year the EU imported €16.7 billion worth of gaseous hydrocarbons from Russia (including pipeline gas and LNG) (a reduction of almost 2.9 times by 2022).

As for oil, temporary permission to import Russian oil by sea was granted to Bulgaria (Sofia states that it intends to stop this import in March 2024), and supplies via the Druzhba oil pipeline to Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic were removed from sanctions. As a result, in 2023, Bulgaria imported €2.5 billion worth of Russian crude oil, the Czech Republic – €1.9 billion, Slovakia – €1.9 billion, and Hungary – €2.1 billion.

“On the horizon of the next decades, Russia will remain a partner of the European Union in the energy sector, but its share will be at the level of 5–15%, no more,” says Valery Semikashev, head of the fuel and energy sector forecasting laboratory at the Institute of National Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to him, LNG supplies will be maintained in the next two to three years: “Russian LNG is the cheapest source of gas for Europe, both in terms of cost and short transport distance.” However, much will depend on trends in energy consumption in Europe: it may remain at the current level, or it may decline. And in the latter case, “Russian LNG (and gas is most actively used in the electric power industry, industry and residential heating, where refusal or significant reductions in use are possible) will not be particularly needed,” argues Semikashev. He recalls that some EU countries unilaterally refused to purchase LNG from Russia, although sanctions were not imposed against it.

“In the field of nuclear fuel, Russia has been a significant player since the times of the Soviet Union, and neither the EU nor the United States will be able to refuse our fuel yet,” Firanchuk points out. As RBC reported, in 2023, the United States imported almost $1.2 billion worth of Russian enriched uranium. “There is a possibility that they will be able to replace Russia with Kazakhstan, because we are enriching Kazakh uranium, but this is a slow process,” the expert adds.

Fertilizers and pharmaceuticals

As for fertilizers (their imports to the EU from Russia in 2023 amounted to $1.38 billion), they are officially excluded from the sanctions list and “the EU has no desire to worsen the situation of local farmers by cutting them off from Russian fertilizers,” Firanchuk emphasizes. The same is with metals - titanium, aluminum, nickel, copper, palladium.

Most likely, positions that are not yet affected by sanctions will remain in trade - buyers are interested in them, that is, these are real important markets that they will not want to lose, Daniltsev believes. “However, this is a political issue, and it is difficult to make accurate forecasts,” he says.

Exports of drugs and serums from the EU to Russia have remained virtually unchanged compared to 2021, notes Firanchuk. According to Eurostat, in 2023, exports of European pharmaceutical products to Russia even increased by 8%. According to the expert, the EU announced that the humanitarian part of the supplies was not targeted for sanctions. “Banning the supply of these particular goods to Russia seems strange and not in the logic of the European Union,” he sums up.

RBC sent a request to the Ministry of Economic Development.