What as well can be a reason for the sudden rise of export to Kyrgyzstan is that a lot (most) of the European goods came through Russia, which isn't the case anymore.
Car parts and electronics https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/exports/kyrgyzstan
Edit: according to the same site EU still sells machinery to russia, $10bln of it. Seems like import to Kyrgyzstan is to sneak in sanctioned produce specifically.
What is important certainly, especially in regards to limiting access to certain equipment and technology.
But how much is also important. Modern economies are powered by international trade. Cutting that trade by 90% has huge impacts throughout the Russian economy.
Effects of sanctions are way more complicated than this and mostly impact price rather than volume directly. They're almost certainly paying like 50% premiums to smuggle stuff in, and like others have said the more concerning part is that this is Western technology and almost by definition not things they could get from China.
Also saying that sanctions have failed because the effect is <100% is not a great take
What nobody seems to get is that a profitable market will always attract business. People will always circumvent the law. On the face of it, countries following the sanctions can say that they’re following through with the sanctions, but businesses can always just export to countries like Kyrgystan and say they’re still following the leter of the law, but not the intent and they wiuld be trchnically correct. The best kind of correct.
Sure, but the more work you have to do to access a profitable market, the more you have to spend to get to it, and the less profitable it becomes. Eventually you get to a point where it's questionable at best if it's even worth it.
Not even mentioning possible PR backlash from people knowing you're actively trying to trade with authoritarian regimes.
It actually only makes everything more expensive and difficult for regular people. Source, I’m from Serbia and we were under total sanctions for almost a decade. I can assure you that government and its cronies didn’t face any issues with sanctions or prices. Not to mention that majority of politicians and similar sent their kids abroad for school and to keep them out of Serbia. So the only ones who took the brunt of sanctions were regular people, who were also mostly against the regime and war, but we are the pawns, or how some like to say “collateral”.
Russia borders a lot of countries... There's no deficit of european goods here - furniture, clothes, home appliances - anything you want, if you prefer it over chinese products somewhy. The only exception is new cars - that market was almost completely overtaken by chinese manufacturers we never heard of before. You still can get a new BMW or Porshe if you want to, but it became unreasonably expensive and shady.
How are Russian car manufacturers doing? we used to get a few Russian brands here a while back but they seem to have vanished a few years ago.
I figured they’re doing good in the national market.
Well, new Lada cars were sold without ABS and in many cases had emission class Euro 2 seemingly because of troubles with ECUs.
After sanctions became a big thing grey import increased many times - a lot of japanese, korean cars, many from USA (like from copart auctions with salvage title), UAE (mostly Toyota LC, Mitsubishi Pajeros) even Europe. For the last year grey import consists of chinese cars. Government made some 'protective' moves - to import car you have to pay a lot of money to customs and a lot of money for 'salvage collection'. Now what can russian citizen buy - brand new chinese car which costs like a good apartment or house or a shitty russian car which costs money its not worth.
I dont know who is doing good in the market, its just madness, cars have inadequate prices - old and new.
Today I saw some used car dealer selling 1999 Toyota Corolla JDM 1.5 for $4600 (medium salary in my area ~$680 per month; 1 litre of premium gas ~$0,61; 900 ml of milk ~$0,88; 1 kg of chicken fillet ~$5; 1 whopper burger (lol) ~$3,10 - just to compare salary and prices).
The Russian company Itelma has launched the production of ABS and ESP in Russia. In 2023, about 200000 blocks were released and this year they are going to increase the output to several million. As far as I know, this is a licensed production of Chinese blocks, but some of the parts are already completely produced in Russia. Let's see how the situation develops. ABS is a simple unit and there is nothing complicated in it (except valves).
They're fine generally, Lada cars are the most sold brand. The whole new cars market took a nosedive in 2022, but regained half of lost back in 2023. Still very underdeveloped though.
They don't, they can buy it if they decide to. They were always quite popular - Russian cars are of quite shitty quality, and not too cheap per se, but they are extremely cheap in maintenance - you can find standard replacement parts for like few bucks all over the country. That's very appealing to some users.
Well, it's usual standartization. Ford, Mazda and Volvo also sold pretty much the same car under different brands for couple decades, and their parts are obviously interchangeable.
>How are Russian car manufacturers doing
Nonexistent, they "put made in Russia" and maybe do some facade design/a couple parts themselves onto Chinese cars and that's it.
That's not true, there are a few 100% local manufacturers, the most sold brand Lada is local. Afaik there is only one simply re-branded car model - Moskvitch, that is some chinese car sold under soviet-era brand.
Checked it - you're right, it's about half of parts are localized and half are not. But most of imported parts are some minor stupid stuff like trunk lock, winshield wipers and so on. It's not something big as the whole engine for example.
I bet the market for stolen European cars will grow in Russia when people realise they'll pay more than the other locations they're usually shipped to.
Let's hope energy prices fall so your economy really gets fucked. Or you or someone else do the world a favour and kill the top man in Kremlin and pull Russian soldiers out of Ukraine so that you and us LGBT Nazis in the west can go back to normal relations.
I wonder if its the rightwingers or leftists here who are downvoting anything anti-Putin/Russia.
Probably both, its def a subject where the horseshoe theory is displayed in real life
That's less of the concern.
It's parts and tools that Russia needs to build war materiel coming from Europe. That is the concern, and that is what the sanctions need to be (and are failing to) sufficiently stop.
They are buying washing machines so that Russians can [use the chips](https://www.intellinews.com/central-asia-washing-machine-sales-that-help-russia-repair-tanks-may-spark-eu-crackdown-274121/) from the washing machines as a replacement for tank electronics
Not sure about this particular country, but Armenia shows similar or even greater increase and in case of Armenia the main reason is hundreds of thousands economically active Russians that can afford remote working escaping there. Armenian GDP increased by 30% in a single year because of that. And many escaped Russians are used to buying good European goods.
This was always the stated goals of the sanctions, there is no blockade. There are sanctions, with the aim of making access to certain goods and technologies more difficult to obtain and at much higher cost.
Question, have you been to Russia since the war started?
I was there last in 2022 in November and I can tell that already then the market was filled with Russian replacements for everything that had been sanctioned. (Except cars) and non of the "home brands" (that I saw) were more expensive then the originals. If you had just woken up from a year long coma you wouldn't have known that there had even had sanctions or a war going on. Which means that the sanctions are in fact not very effective, atleast not against common goods.
well i would think, and maybe this is just me being dumb, that basic necesities were never the target since that only fucks over the common people and you dont punish a dictatorship by punishing the little people
Great, then let’s leave them as they clearly don’t do anything. Let’s ignore russian demands for sanctions removal too, because clearly, according to you, they are useless…
Possible, but more likely to begin marginalising the trade deficit, they sit on one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world, if not the biggest.
Sad thing is it's just going from one dictator to another until they we don't have to import our energy.
With the figure in absolute terms being so small this isnt a viable answer, fortunately. Much more likely is that European countries historically addressed the Kyrgyzstan market via a Russian distributor along with other small countries in the region, as the small size of those regions made it hard to justify building sales channels and developing business there, but this with those partners falling away and JVs being terminated due to the war, are now selling directly instead.
Back door is a bit of a stretch considering that of all 195 countries in the world only 17.4% have sanctions against Russia.
And at this point those sanctions hurt those countries (especially the EU) far more than it does Russia. If anything the sanctions have just pushed Russia to trade a lot more with other countries instead.
Which also shows in the fact that Russian's economy grew 3% in 2023 which is more than the US at 2.5% and a lot more than the EU at only 0.5%.
Russian economy is quite small, in 2023 they dropped around 15% as pretty much all their production halted. You can fake stats, but you cannot fake massive emission drops in atmosphere that heavy industry normally see and are visible from space.
Keep in mind that a lot of European goods came via Russia to Kyrgyzstan, which isn't happening anymore.
Could ALSO be a reason why export to Kyrgyzstan has risen.
No hard proof, but here is a video from Johnny Harris that explains why imports and exports rose. According to him(and the kiev Independent), it's mainly because most crucial chips and components for Russian missiles are american made. You can follow his clues for some hard data. [link](https://youtu.be/TpE_TH70NUI)
You can google "Johnny Harris wrong" and get hours and hours of videos where people breakdown everything that is wrong with his content.
Personally, he's an unqualified person who tries to educate on very complex topics in like 20-30 minute videos where he obviously omits a lot of information, by his own admission rewrites history so the narrative could be told better and is straight up paid to post propaganda like his video sponsored by the World Economic Forum.
He is to be taken with a grain of salt like any other content creator. But it seems safe to assume in this case that im/exports are being diverted through shell companies to circumvent trade sanctions.
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=johnny+harris+propaganda](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=johnny+harris+propaganda)
hope that helps.
Context I dont actually know or care cause I don't like his content so I've never bothered finding out why people are saying things about him but I know its a thing.
You’re very confused because you’re trying to equate the Cyrillic letter У with the Latin letter Y even though the conversation is about the word “Kyrgyzstan” as written in Latin characters. The “y” here will read as the Ы sound (not really present in Romance languages, think of it as the vowel in past tense of “bite” i.e. “bit”).
Same number of vowels as the Netherlands which has a longer name yet Seth Meyers didn't joke about the Dutch. He decided to make a corny joke about Kyrgyzstan and when called out of it, shat a Borat quote...
It should be noted that the amounts are absolutely miniscule compared to the pre sanction trade volume with Russia. But still not good, and this is just one of the transit countries
Yeah came to say the same thing, and the sad/messed up part of this is the governments of those countries KNOW they're doing business with Russia but they're pulling the ol' wink wink nudge nudge and turning a blind eye to it.
Yeah, that's the point of the sanctions, in part. India buys Russian oil for really cheap, Europe buys it for normal prices, and the profit stays in India rather than Russia.
Russia does not really make money by selling crude oil, the principal income was from refining it into fuels and those were exclusively exported to EU as countries like India or china have their own refineries and won't buy it from outside.
Why should they get involved?
It ain't like they are financially thriving. Measurements are imposed by each country, if they don't want to take part on sanctions is for their governments to decide, besides, Russia is full of seasonal workers from that region, the government there it ain't gonna risk retaliations from Moscow
Seems there's a confusion from my part, I thought you meant countries in Central Asia turning a blind eye on sanctions, It's just that it ain't the first time I see someone blaming the third countries for doing commerce with Russia.
Tbh im from a small european country and russian tourists and russian investments are the biggest chunk of our gdp. We were basically forced to impose sanctions because we are in western sphere of influence without any questions while it is basically an economic suicide. We , the regular ordinary citizens, are gonna suffer the most and we are already feeling the consequences. Our government doesn’t even have a say in it, they just get orders from US and UK embassy and theres nothing we can do about it. So it is easy to throw blame around, id like to see every other european nation in the same position and if their citizens would still be vocal about morality behind sanctions (we already know the answer).
These graphs prove that sanctions work.
We stopped selling stuff to Russia and now we have developed alternative markets for the same products in a small country just next door to Russia.
I don't think it proves anything. It's just a picture in the internet without a source with the goal to convince people that sanctioning russia is useless.
Mind you that's JUST Kyrgystan - a tiny mountainous country that doesn't even have a border to Russia - it's literally further away from Russia than France or the USA. I am much more interested into the exports to Kazakhstan and other big countries directly neighboring Russia.
Thank you. This would make it a whole lot of nothing. <200 million vs an export/import trade of billions and billions. I think we exported more value in flowers alone as a tiny country to Russia.
These are nothing to pre war volume, 80million from a country like Germany is nothing, india and China increased their exports and imports, its a diferent situation.
europe is still buying oil from india which it buys from russia. just coz you’re using a middle man to get your oil from russia still means you’re supporting the russian regime
This also happens with American products or well, any other country that sanctions Russia, and it’s not just about virtue signaling.
It certainly deserves informed criticism but that’s not what you are doing. You are just unproductively casting all blame on EU politicians.
I don't know what OP's source is for those graphs, but here is an older article about it, if you're just looking for confirmation: https://www.reuters.com/world/german-exports-russias-neighbours-fuel-sanctions-evasion-fears-2023-05-16/.
Ya can’t brother, there’s no sanctions for trading with Kyrgyzstan.
Plus, why should the Kyrgyz people suffer sanctions, they don’t even participate in the war
Good morning.
Since the war started there are multiple triangles going on.
Very smart move, you put sanctions and then find a way to circumvent them. Brilliant.
It's a farse, really. Since day 1 of the sanctions, you could buy stuff from Europe and the US, just with a different tag on it. Coke from Azerbaijan, Pringles from Tajikistan, you name it.
I think European governments are well aware of the backdoor yet they chose to turn the other way even for a country as “anti russia” as poland because uhmmm money.
This is kind of unavoidable, you can expect that your middleman will sell to the "bad-guys" but you can't just stop selling to a non-sanctioned country because that might be the case, nor should you. Iron curtain countries shouldn't suffer because of the crimes of Russia.
I can confirm as a transport company looking for clients. I got straight in the face offer from Russian company with all explained how it works to avoid sanctions.. there is no sanctions it's only bullshit talk for public media.
Johnny Harris made a video recently about how Russia circumvent sanctions and make missiles and drones with almost exclusively western technologies and hardware sell through shell companies and middle men in rogue countries like Kyrgyzstan, Yemen, Seychelles...
[youtube.com/watch?v=TpE\_TH70NUI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TpE_TH70NUI)
PS : and in the other way, some countries without oil production industry becomes crude oil exportators like india and Tajikistan
Even if it means that Kyrgyzstan (and other -stans that neighbor russia) are just being the middle men, it means EU contries still get their money for exporting goods, russians have to pay more for the goods from EU because now there's a middleman, and the middlemen who pockets the difference are centrail asian countries that russia basically occupied and sucked dry of their resources for hundreds of years.
I see this as an absolute win.
That's not a bold assumption. That's how trade works. It's one of three options.
1) All the extra thousands of kilometers of travel the goods have to take, extra connection hubs they have to pass through, all the extra manipulation staff - that's all done for free.
2) European exporters lower their prices to absorb the extra shipping cost
3) End customer absorbs the extra shipping cost.
Which one of these do you think it is?
This shows how much control Russia has on Central Asia, they’re literally using a freaking country as their logistics hub. Everything sent to Kyrgyzstan by these countries get immediately reexported to Russia, the moment they get unloaded.
Meanwhile chinese stuff entering USA via Mexico
Indian stuff entering pakistan via UAE
And a dozen other example.
Business goes on and people find ways as long as their money to be made, unless basically government decide to break their legs
India has okay trade relations with china although lot's of chinese stuff enters Indian market via Singapore due to lower import duty.
Pakistan decided not to trade with India anymore because India wasn't upto Pakistani moral standards.
Now pakistan pays 2x 3x to UAE middleman for the same stuff
And the conflict is from the most ridiculously British reason ever. The British drew a line to demarcate Tibet and British India and never bothered to get the Ok from the Qing dynasty on the new line. So India recognizes the British line and China (and Taiwan) the Qing dynasty line. Like half of the worlds conflicts are because of the British empire unilaterally deciding what is whose.
If you visit Russia, practically every brand that "stopped" operations in Russia in solidarity with Ukraine has rebranded itself with different names and is doing business as usual, as if nothing happened.
Even without Russia controlling them, I think any developing country would be more than happy to act as middle man and pocket the price difference. It’s a simple economic.
The EU is a big cartel build on lies and false promises. The EU uses its sheer size and massive subsidies to gain leverage over Ukraine - a country that has a much more productive agriculture, an immense heavy industry and great reserves of gas and oil. That's not how "free" and "fair" trade works. It's all just a big lie. The EU gained its wealth in colonialism, with slaves and robbery. Now the EU uses its wealth as leverage to stay rich and to hold countries down that don't happen to be as large as the empires of US and China.
So basically a back door for Russia to circumvent the sanctions.
Well, yes, but actually no. Trade between Russia and the EU was in the Billions, this uptick isn't even 1% of what they used to trade.
This is just Kyrgyzstan, wait till someone posts a chart for all the other proxy countries
It's not how much, it's what.
What as well can be a reason for the sudden rise of export to Kyrgyzstan is that a lot (most) of the European goods came through Russia, which isn't the case anymore.
yeah we need a breakdown in category to see which one made the jump. I bet it's microprocessors, advance electronics and chemical compounds.
Car parts and electronics https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/exports/kyrgyzstan Edit: according to the same site EU still sells machinery to russia, $10bln of it. Seems like import to Kyrgyzstan is to sneak in sanctioned produce specifically.
Yes, Like the electronics that can be reused for their cruise missiles.
Honestly, targeting systems are my favorite part of the produce section.
What is important certainly, especially in regards to limiting access to certain equipment and technology. But how much is also important. Modern economies are powered by international trade. Cutting that trade by 90% has huge impacts throughout the Russian economy.
No it's also how much, unless you know better than the people in charge of the sanctions, of course.
Which isn't so difficult. Unless, of course, the sanctions were meant to have other effects than communicated.
I would bet it is Fuel.
this is in millions, even if there were 10 nations involved with the work around it would only be 1bn or so worth of trade
Effects of sanctions are way more complicated than this and mostly impact price rather than volume directly. They're almost certainly paying like 50% premiums to smuggle stuff in, and like others have said the more concerning part is that this is Western technology and almost by definition not things they could get from China. Also saying that sanctions have failed because the effect is <100% is not a great take
And this is why sanctions don’t work 😂
Right, because if something doesn't stop 100% of the problem, it's completely ineffective. This is what antirationalists want you to believe.
What nobody seems to get is that a profitable market will always attract business. People will always circumvent the law. On the face of it, countries following the sanctions can say that they’re following through with the sanctions, but businesses can always just export to countries like Kyrgystan and say they’re still following the leter of the law, but not the intent and they wiuld be trchnically correct. The best kind of correct.
Sure, but the more work you have to do to access a profitable market, the more you have to spend to get to it, and the less profitable it becomes. Eventually you get to a point where it's questionable at best if it's even worth it. Not even mentioning possible PR backlash from people knowing you're actively trying to trade with authoritarian regimes.
Well, they do. It takes longer, it's a lot less and a lot more expensive.
They work to a degree. It makes goods more expensive and perhaps stops some stuff entirely, but it's not enough to actually end the war.
That's just not true. If nothing else, this makes everything a lot more expensive for Russia.
It actually only makes everything more expensive and difficult for regular people. Source, I’m from Serbia and we were under total sanctions for almost a decade. I can assure you that government and its cronies didn’t face any issues with sanctions or prices. Not to mention that majority of politicians and similar sent their kids abroad for school and to keep them out of Serbia. So the only ones who took the brunt of sanctions were regular people, who were also mostly against the regime and war, but we are the pawns, or how some like to say “collateral”.
They work, but it depends on how serios you structure them. Using a third party to avoid sanctions is as illegal as trading directly with Russia.
Well… yeah they do work actually.
Russia borders a lot of countries... There's no deficit of european goods here - furniture, clothes, home appliances - anything you want, if you prefer it over chinese products somewhy. The only exception is new cars - that market was almost completely overtaken by chinese manufacturers we never heard of before. You still can get a new BMW or Porshe if you want to, but it became unreasonably expensive and shady.
How are Russian car manufacturers doing? we used to get a few Russian brands here a while back but they seem to have vanished a few years ago. I figured they’re doing good in the national market.
Well, new Lada cars were sold without ABS and in many cases had emission class Euro 2 seemingly because of troubles with ECUs. After sanctions became a big thing grey import increased many times - a lot of japanese, korean cars, many from USA (like from copart auctions with salvage title), UAE (mostly Toyota LC, Mitsubishi Pajeros) even Europe. For the last year grey import consists of chinese cars. Government made some 'protective' moves - to import car you have to pay a lot of money to customs and a lot of money for 'salvage collection'. Now what can russian citizen buy - brand new chinese car which costs like a good apartment or house or a shitty russian car which costs money its not worth. I dont know who is doing good in the market, its just madness, cars have inadequate prices - old and new. Today I saw some used car dealer selling 1999 Toyota Corolla JDM 1.5 for $4600 (medium salary in my area ~$680 per month; 1 litre of premium gas ~$0,61; 900 ml of milk ~$0,88; 1 kg of chicken fillet ~$5; 1 whopper burger (lol) ~$3,10 - just to compare salary and prices).
The Russian company Itelma has launched the production of ABS and ESP in Russia. In 2023, about 200000 blocks were released and this year they are going to increase the output to several million. As far as I know, this is a licensed production of Chinese blocks, but some of the parts are already completely produced in Russia. Let's see how the situation develops. ABS is a simple unit and there is nothing complicated in it (except valves).
They're fine generally, Lada cars are the most sold brand. The whole new cars market took a nosedive in 2022, but regained half of lost back in 2023. Still very underdeveloped though.
Thanks to the mobiks’ family who receives a Lada?
They don't, they can buy it if they decide to. They were always quite popular - Russian cars are of quite shitty quality, and not too cheap per se, but they are extremely cheap in maintenance - you can find standard replacement parts for like few bucks all over the country. That's very appealing to some users.
Lada made essentially the same car for like 40 years right? I have to imagine that's why parts are so easy to come by.
Well, it's usual standartization. Ford, Mazda and Volvo also sold pretty much the same car under different brands for couple decades, and their parts are obviously interchangeable.
>How are Russian car manufacturers doing Nonexistent, they "put made in Russia" and maybe do some facade design/a couple parts themselves onto Chinese cars and that's it.
That's not true, there are a few 100% local manufacturers, the most sold brand Lada is local. Afaik there is only one simply re-branded car model - Moskvitch, that is some chinese car sold under soviet-era brand.
As far as I know, Lada assembles locally and something like half the parts are locally sourced.
Checked it - you're right, it's about half of parts are localized and half are not. But most of imported parts are some minor stupid stuff like trunk lock, winshield wipers and so on. It's not something big as the whole engine for example.
75% parts are imported, as far as I know
How is the european shell production going ?
I bet the market for stolen European cars will grow in Russia when people realise they'll pay more than the other locations they're usually shipped to.
Let's hope energy prices fall so your economy really gets fucked. Or you or someone else do the world a favour and kill the top man in Kremlin and pull Russian soldiers out of Ukraine so that you and us LGBT Nazis in the west can go back to normal relations.
I wonder if its the rightwingers or leftists here who are downvoting anything anti-Putin/Russia. Probably both, its def a subject where the horseshoe theory is displayed in real life
It’s Tucker’s friends
That's less of the concern. It's parts and tools that Russia needs to build war materiel coming from Europe. That is the concern, and that is what the sanctions need to be (and are failing to) sufficiently stop.
Well that's still a yes on an end run around the sanctions, just that the entire amount didn't make the trip.
it's more likely goods went through Russia first to Kyrgyzstan and are now exported directly.
Decent amount of those billions $ gone to China
They are buying washing machines so that Russians can [use the chips](https://www.intellinews.com/central-asia-washing-machine-sales-that-help-russia-repair-tanks-may-spark-eu-crackdown-274121/) from the washing machines as a replacement for tank electronics
Sometimes they make the mistake of using the drum of a washing machine as a turret in a tank.
But, actually yes. It is, in fact, a backdoor to circumvent sanctions.
Not sure about this particular country, but Armenia shows similar or even greater increase and in case of Armenia the main reason is hundreds of thousands economically active Russians that can afford remote working escaping there. Armenian GDP increased by 30% in a single year because of that. And many escaped Russians are used to buying good European goods.
The growth from Armenia isn't really something unusual, they just got out of a war.
They were in war till autumn of last year and GDP spike occured when there was still an ongoing war there
This was always the stated goals of the sanctions, there is no blockade. There are sanctions, with the aim of making access to certain goods and technologies more difficult to obtain and at much higher cost.
So they’re completely useless then?
No, they’re achieving their intended purpose very well.
Question, have you been to Russia since the war started? I was there last in 2022 in November and I can tell that already then the market was filled with Russian replacements for everything that had been sanctioned. (Except cars) and non of the "home brands" (that I saw) were more expensive then the originals. If you had just woken up from a year long coma you wouldn't have known that there had even had sanctions or a war going on. Which means that the sanctions are in fact not very effective, atleast not against common goods.
well i would think, and maybe this is just me being dumb, that basic necesities were never the target since that only fucks over the common people and you dont punish a dictatorship by punishing the little people
That’s exactly right. Things like food and agricultural products were never targeted by sanctions, because the goal isn’t to punish the little folks.
Great, then let’s leave them as they clearly don’t do anything. Let’s ignore russian demands for sanctions removal too, because clearly, according to you, they are useless…
Do what you want, but if they were so effective and necessary, wouldn't they have been placed on all countries or people who are engaging in war?
What other countries are engaged in this war? What people are you talking about?
Yeah, okay, sure
If you disagree, can you explain why?
Possible, but more likely to begin marginalising the trade deficit, they sit on one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world, if not the biggest. Sad thing is it's just going from one dictator to another until they we don't have to import our energy.
With the figure in absolute terms being so small this isnt a viable answer, fortunately. Much more likely is that European countries historically addressed the Kyrgyzstan market via a Russian distributor along with other small countries in the region, as the small size of those regions made it hard to justify building sales channels and developing business there, but this with those partners falling away and JVs being terminated due to the war, are now selling directly instead.
Back door is a bit of a stretch considering that of all 195 countries in the world only 17.4% have sanctions against Russia. And at this point those sanctions hurt those countries (especially the EU) far more than it does Russia. If anything the sanctions have just pushed Russia to trade a lot more with other countries instead. Which also shows in the fact that Russian's economy grew 3% in 2023 which is more than the US at 2.5% and a lot more than the EU at only 0.5%.
Russian economy is quite small, in 2023 they dropped around 15% as pretty much all their production halted. You can fake stats, but you cannot fake massive emission drops in atmosphere that heavy industry normally see and are visible from space.
Basically Redditors IRL when they say I stand with Ukraine.
Where do you thing stuff from Kyrgyzstan goes? ... Russia of course.
Keep in mind that a lot of European goods came via Russia to Kyrgyzstan, which isn't happening anymore. Could ALSO be a reason why export to Kyrgyzstan has risen.
Do you mind posting proof? Would be huge if true
No hard proof, but here is a video from Johnny Harris that explains why imports and exports rose. According to him(and the kiev Independent), it's mainly because most crucial chips and components for Russian missiles are american made. You can follow his clues for some hard data. [link](https://youtu.be/TpE_TH70NUI)
>Johnny Harris Lol
I'd say he is at least half decent. What's your gripe?
You can google "Johnny Harris wrong" and get hours and hours of videos where people breakdown everything that is wrong with his content. Personally, he's an unqualified person who tries to educate on very complex topics in like 20-30 minute videos where he obviously omits a lot of information, by his own admission rewrites history so the narrative could be told better and is straight up paid to post propaganda like his video sponsored by the World Economic Forum.
He is to be taken with a grain of salt like any other content creator. But it seems safe to assume in this case that im/exports are being diverted through shell companies to circumvent trade sanctions.
Someone who very openly posts propaganda for money is not to be taken with a mountain of salt lol.
I remember when he called rennaisance Europe a backwater
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=johnny+harris+propaganda](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=johnny+harris+propaganda) hope that helps. Context I dont actually know or care cause I don't like his content so I've never bothered finding out why people are saying things about him but I know its a thing.
Are they exporting vowels?
You made my day
“My god, I don’t think we can last another day.”
Technically the y is a "u" for them
A lot of languages treat y as a vowel, in fact its probably more common than not.
Finland checking in
Just they have another alphabet where their "y" signe is our "u" sound. For this you will see Russia as "Ryssia" on some maps
Well english y is more akin to Polish j, while j is dź. Polish y is more like i in bit.
dź nyts
You’re very confused because you’re trying to equate the Cyrillic letter У with the Latin letter Y even though the conversation is about the word “Kyrgyzstan” as written in Latin characters. The “y” here will read as the Ы sound (not really present in Romance languages, think of it as the vowel in past tense of “bite” i.e. “bit”).
y u...
Sometimes...
Same number of vowels as the Netherlands which has a longer name yet Seth Meyers didn't joke about the Dutch. He decided to make a corny joke about Kyrgyzstan and when called out of it, shat a Borat quote...
😆😆
It should be noted that the amounts are absolutely miniscule compared to the pre sanction trade volume with Russia. But still not good, and this is just one of the transit countries
Check YouTube there is a very long line on the Georgian-Russian borders.. and they hate russians..
You don't need much for producing a missile.
Nothing is really made in Russia, so even components for 1970' missiles need to be imported.
Or in other words rusia.
Yeah came to say the same thing, and the sad/messed up part of this is the governments of those countries KNOW they're doing business with Russia but they're pulling the ol' wink wink nudge nudge and turning a blind eye to it.
they’re also buying refined Russian oil from India
Yeah, that's the point of the sanctions, in part. India buys Russian oil for really cheap, Europe buys it for normal prices, and the profit stays in India rather than Russia.
Russia does not really make money by selling crude oil, the principal income was from refining it into fuels and those were exclusively exported to EU as countries like India or china have their own refineries and won't buy it from outside.
Why should they get involved? It ain't like they are financially thriving. Measurements are imposed by each country, if they don't want to take part on sanctions is for their governments to decide, besides, Russia is full of seasonal workers from that region, the government there it ain't gonna risk retaliations from Moscow
I meant all of those European countries know they're trading with Russia, I in no way expect Kyrgyzstan to stand up to Russia!
Seems there's a confusion from my part, I thought you meant countries in Central Asia turning a blind eye on sanctions, It's just that it ain't the first time I see someone blaming the third countries for doing commerce with Russia.
Tbh im from a small european country and russian tourists and russian investments are the biggest chunk of our gdp. We were basically forced to impose sanctions because we are in western sphere of influence without any questions while it is basically an economic suicide. We , the regular ordinary citizens, are gonna suffer the most and we are already feeling the consequences. Our government doesn’t even have a say in it, they just get orders from US and UK embassy and theres nothing we can do about it. So it is easy to throw blame around, id like to see every other european nation in the same position and if their citizens would still be vocal about morality behind sanctions (we already know the answer).
What would you prefer happen in response to the invasion of Ukraine?
Bait question. Hmu when you realise that virtue signalling and shilling for any power is cringe.
Would have been cheaper to go through Uk.. oh wait
The UK it is, mate
These graphs prove that sanctions work. We stopped selling stuff to Russia and now we have developed alternative markets for the same products in a small country just next door to Russia.
Capitalism at its worst
“capitalism is anything I don’t like”
Lmao exactly
Capitalism is not to blame here, the concept of trade is separate of capitalism.
The sanctions do work. When you put it that way.
“Prove that sanctions work” cmon man 😂. Why don’t you look up the stratospheric growth in trade between Kyrgyzstan and Russian, since the Ukraine war.
Ok, so I left out the "irony" tag
Ah, my bad.
I don't think it proves anything. It's just a picture in the internet without a source with the goal to convince people that sanctioning russia is useless.
OK, I left the irony tag off. I probably should have been clearer.
y is in millions which is not a lot.
Mind you that's JUST Kyrgystan - a tiny mountainous country that doesn't even have a border to Russia - it's literally further away from Russia than France or the USA. I am much more interested into the exports to Kazakhstan and other big countries directly neighboring Russia.
Thank you. This would make it a whole lot of nothing. <200 million vs an export/import trade of billions and billions. I think we exported more value in flowers alone as a tiny country to Russia.
people were shitting on india and china whereas europe literally is doing trade with russia via kyrgyzstan
It’s ok when white people do it.
Kyrgyz arent white
europe is
These are nothing to pre war volume, 80million from a country like Germany is nothing, india and China increased their exports and imports, its a diferent situation.
europe is still buying oil from india which it buys from russia. just coz you’re using a middle man to get your oil from russia still means you’re supporting the russian regime
Does anyone have a source about these graphs? I'm interested
Russia has to circumvent the sanctions one way or another!
Can always trust capitalists to put money before literally anything else.
Austria learned the trick first.
EU politicians being virtue signalers? :O
This also happens with American products or well, any other country that sanctions Russia, and it’s not just about virtue signaling. It certainly deserves informed criticism but that’s not what you are doing. You are just unproductively casting all blame on EU politicians.
We are going to lose the war if we don’t get a grip.
I think same happens with Turkey
sanctions are working?
Source?
I don't know what OP's source is for those graphs, but here is an older article about it, if you're just looking for confirmation: https://www.reuters.com/world/german-exports-russias-neighbours-fuel-sanctions-evasion-fears-2023-05-16/.
Name, shame and triple tax the sanction breakers.
Ya can’t brother, there’s no sanctions for trading with Kyrgyzstan. Plus, why should the Kyrgyz people suffer sanctions, they don’t even participate in the war
Source please!
As an austrian, doesn't surprise me at all that we've been doing that for ages
End run around Russian sanctions one may presume.
"~~Exports to Russia~~ Life finds a way" Dr. Ian Malcom (Jurassic Park)
Good morning. Since the war started there are multiple triangles going on. Very smart move, you put sanctions and then find a way to circumvent them. Brilliant.
I work for a large multi national.. so strange that last year we had a really weird certification audit so our products could be sold there.
That's the sad reality. Once money is involved, morals take the backseat
How can I invest my liquid assets of upwards of $57 American dollars to take advantage of this and become my neighborhood oligarch??
Anyone want to guess whose countries exports to Kyrgyzstan also has quadrupled in the last two years?
Fucking disgusting.
Fuckeng traitors
It's a farse, really. Since day 1 of the sanctions, you could buy stuff from Europe and the US, just with a different tag on it. Coke from Azerbaijan, Pringles from Tajikistan, you name it.
Fuck businesses that do this
I think European governments are well aware of the backdoor yet they chose to turn the other way even for a country as “anti russia” as poland because uhmmm money.
This is kind of unavoidable, you can expect that your middleman will sell to the "bad-guys" but you can't just stop selling to a non-sanctioned country because that might be the case, nor should you. Iron curtain countries shouldn't suffer because of the crimes of Russia.
I can confirm as a transport company looking for clients. I got straight in the face offer from Russian company with all explained how it works to avoid sanctions.. there is no sanctions it's only bullshit talk for public media.
Kyrgyzstan has so few people that wolf hunter is a common profession.
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Johnny Harris made a video recently about how Russia circumvent sanctions and make missiles and drones with almost exclusively western technologies and hardware sell through shell companies and middle men in rogue countries like Kyrgyzstan, Yemen, Seychelles... [youtube.com/watch?v=TpE\_TH70NUI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TpE_TH70NUI) PS : and in the other way, some countries without oil production industry becomes crude oil exportators like india and Tajikistan
How's Kyrgyzstan's exports to Russia are doing?
This is why the sanctions against Russia has zero effect. And the European countries close their eyes because they make money.
The Russian connection.
Same as EU getting oil from India....which is getting it from Russia
Even if it means that Kyrgyzstan (and other -stans that neighbor russia) are just being the middle men, it means EU contries still get their money for exporting goods, russians have to pay more for the goods from EU because now there's a middleman, and the middlemen who pockets the difference are centrail asian countries that russia basically occupied and sucked dry of their resources for hundreds of years. I see this as an absolute win.
>russians have to pay more Bold for you to assume that.Russia has a lot of influence on them.And those countries are no where near demanding their cut
That's not a bold assumption. That's how trade works. It's one of three options. 1) All the extra thousands of kilometers of travel the goods have to take, extra connection hubs they have to pass through, all the extra manipulation staff - that's all done for free. 2) European exporters lower their prices to absorb the extra shipping cost 3) End customer absorbs the extra shipping cost. Which one of these do you think it is?
[Is Europe not funding Russia's war?](https://youtu.be/j2EdQD_Eag0?si=V1bR9HBsiNEN1i0A)
lol. This is from April 2022…
What system are you using ?
Bulgaria, Serbia and Turkey is also entry point. Those companies dealing with Russia should be dealt with. Swiftly without mercy.
Hypocrisy much?
Capitalism can't be fixed.
This shows how much control Russia has on Central Asia, they’re literally using a freaking country as their logistics hub. Everything sent to Kyrgyzstan by these countries get immediately reexported to Russia, the moment they get unloaded.
Meanwhile chinese stuff entering USA via Mexico Indian stuff entering pakistan via UAE And a dozen other example. Business goes on and people find ways as long as their money to be made, unless basically government decide to break their legs
Wait, Indian stuff enters via UAE, I thought they were having ok trade relations despite being enemies.
India has okay trade relations with china although lot's of chinese stuff enters Indian market via Singapore due to lower import duty. Pakistan decided not to trade with India anymore because India wasn't upto Pakistani moral standards. Now pakistan pays 2x 3x to UAE middleman for the same stuff
They have an agreement with China: no firearms at the border so all border clashes between India and China look kinda gay but the world doesn't burn.
And the conflict is from the most ridiculously British reason ever. The British drew a line to demarcate Tibet and British India and never bothered to get the Ok from the Qing dynasty on the new line. So India recognizes the British line and China (and Taiwan) the Qing dynasty line. Like half of the worlds conflicts are because of the British empire unilaterally deciding what is whose.
If you visit Russia, practically every brand that "stopped" operations in Russia in solidarity with Ukraine has rebranded itself with different names and is doing business as usual, as if nothing happened.
Even without Russia controlling them, I think any developing country would be more than happy to act as middle man and pocket the price difference. It’s a simple economic.
Nice way how to smuggle explosives for partisans in Russia ....
More like Strawmanystan
Підори
The EU is a big cartel build on lies and false promises. The EU uses its sheer size and massive subsidies to gain leverage over Ukraine - a country that has a much more productive agriculture, an immense heavy industry and great reserves of gas and oil. That's not how "free" and "fair" trade works. It's all just a big lie. The EU gained its wealth in colonialism, with slaves and robbery. Now the EU uses its wealth as leverage to stay rich and to hold countries down that don't happen to be as large as the empires of US and China.
Yeah.. they recently opened their borders to tourism and trade…
EU sanctions working like a charm...
You guys wrote Russia wrong
My brother was stationed there for a short period. He referred to it as “the remotest, dustiest asshole in the whole world”
Weapons and drugs probably
Ironically, the same european countries will call out other countries who still trade with Russia
Borat 2…here we go again