‘Worrying trend’ as Lithuania’s exports to countries neighbouring Russia double

Lithuania’s exports to Russia have gone down by a third since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, excluding energy products, but exports to countries neighbouring Russia have doubled, Lithuanian data scientist Vaidotas Zemlys-Balevičius says, insisting that government institutions need to look into this.

“We are observing a worrying trend that exports, although they went down to Russia, have increased to neighbouring countries. Lithuania’s exports to Russia fell by 35 percent in 2022. But exports to Russia’s neighbours doubled,” Zemlys-Balevičius told the parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defence on Wednesday, citing Eurostat’s publicly available data.

Moreover, he pointed out, there is a tendency to export to Russia via neighbouring countries, mainly Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Exports of sanctioned goods to Russia also dropped, but exports to countries neighbouring Russia increased sharply, he said.

“Exports of sanctioned goods to the countries surrounding Russia has increased drastically as we now export for 250 million euros every month to the surrounding countries. This means that there’s been a five-fold increase in monthly exports to neighbouring countries,” the scientist said, adding that exports mostly include used cars.

Vaidotas Zemlys Balevičius | J. Stacevičiaus / LRT nuotr.

“For example, the increase in exports to Belarus amounts to 173 million euros, an increase of 215 percent. [...] For some reason, we started exporting data processing machines to Georgia and we now export for 12 million euros, an increase of 14,000 percent. Obviously, we need to look into this,” the data scientist said.

Zemlys-Balevičius also pointed out that similar trends are reported in other EU countries where total exports and exports of sanctioned goods to Russia have decreased since the start of the war, while exports to Russia’s neighbouring countries have gone up. This has been the case for Latvia, Greece, Croatia, and Slovenia.

“The most interesting is the Czech Republic’s case as they started exporting phones to Kazakhstan. Absolutely none of this existed before the war, and now they export for 164 million euros,” Zemlys-Balevičius said.