As the EU cut €59 billion from its Russia exports, its exports to Turkey and Kazakhstan rose €40 billion.

The EU cut direct exports to Russia by €59 billion between 2021 and 2025 — from €89.2 billion to €30.4 billion, a 66 percent decline. Over the same four years, EU exports to two of the routes named in EU Commission circumvention-risk guidance rose by a combined €40.0 billion: Turkey, from €79.1 billion to €114.0 billion (+€34.9B), and Kazakhstan, from €5.5 billion to €10.6 billion (+€5.1B). A third named route, the UAE, rose €22.0 billion over the same window (from €29.8 billion to €51.8 billion); we report that figure with a caveat and hold it apart from the confirmed pair. Turkey's and Kazakhstan's increases cross-verify independently against WITS and the European Commission's trade portal; the UAE's 2025 figure could not be corroborated there, so it rests on Eurostat alone. All three routes are named in EU Commission circumvention-risk guidance as priority routes at risk of channeling EU-origin goods to Russian buyers without appearing in the EU-Russia bilateral record. In 2025 the EU-Russia goods balance turned to a surplus for the first time in the 24 annual observations Eurostat's bilateral series records, which begin in 2002. Across 2002 through 2024 the EU ran a trade deficit with Russia in every one of those 23 years — at its widest in the series, a €147.5 billion deficit in 2022, when Russian energy prices spiked in the first year of the war. By 2025, with EU total goods imports from Russia fallen from €163.6 billion (2021) to €27.9 billion, the EU ran a surplus of €2.5 billion. The series does not extend before 2002, so this is the first inversion within its window, not necessarily the first in the relationship's history. Russia's total imports of goods and services, per World Bank national accounts, were $376.5 billion in 2021 and $380.0 billion in 2023 — effectively unchanged through the first two full years of Western sanctions. [Eurostat ext_lt_maineu, annual bilateral trade, retrieved 2026-09-10; World Bank NE.IMP.GNFS.CD, retrieved 2026-09-10]

The following is analysis, not fact. Read bilaterally against Russia alone, Eurostat's records tell a story of substantial trade disruption: direct EU exports are down 66 percent and the energy-driven deficit that defined the relationship for two decades has turned into a near-balance. Read alongside the three transit hubs named in EU circumvention-risk guidance, the same data raises a harder accounting question. EU exports to the two routes we can state with confidence — Turkey and Kazakhstan — rose €40.0 billion since 2021, against €59 billion lost on the direct route to Russia. Both are named in EU Commission circumvention-risk guidance as priority routes at risk of channeling EU-origin goods to Russian buyers without appearing in the direct bilateral record. Add the UAE's single-source €22.0 billion and the three named routes together gained €62.0 billion, marginally exceeding the direct-export cut. Either figure is consistent with a significant portion of previously Russia-bound European goods being re-routed rather than simply withdrawn from commerce ^sspeculative; the confirmed pair alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of the decline. Eurostat's data does not establish the mechanism or decompose the re-export share from organic trade growth; it establishes the aggregate magnitudes and their coincidence across time. Russia's own import aggregate lends circumstantial weight to the same reading ^sspeculative. A trading economy effectively cut off from a major pre-war partner would typically show a sustained import contraction ^mmodeled; World Bank records instead show 2023 imports roughly matching 2021 at approximately $380 billion, consistent with replacement supply chains rather than absent supply. The bilateral EU-Russia ledger and the four-partner ledger do not contradict each other arithmetically — both are correct Eurostat readings of the same data. What neither can answer in isolation is the question the combined read raises: where did the goods go?

The straightforward counter is that Turkey and the UAE are large, fast-growing economies whose import expansions are substantially self-generated. Turkey's total imports of goods and services grew from $229 billion in 2019 to $387 billion in 2022, per World Bank national accounts — an expansion of $158 billion that may partly reflect domestic inflation, energy purchases, and manufacturing inputs with no inherent relationship to Russia ^mmodeled. The EU's €35 billion gain in Turkish trade over four years is one among many growing supplier relationships in an economy that was already expanding rapidly. Kazakhstan's EU import jump may partly reflect its own infrastructure and modernization investment agenda ^mmodeled. Neither set of flows is inherently attributable to Russia re-export. The EU Commission, while naming these countries in circumvention guidance, also reports progress in enforcing controls on dual-use and military-critical goods. The categories more exposed to re-export are civilian and commercial rather than the weapons-enabling items the sanctions regime was primarily designed to restrict ^mmodeled. Enforcement on high-priority battlefield goods has tightened through successive packages.

**View from Ankara** — Turkey has consistently maintained that it observes international law, has not ratified Western sanctions, and trades under its sovereign rights as an independent state. Turkish officials have rejected 'conduit' framing as an attempt to extend EU regulatory jurisdiction beyond EU territory, noting that Turkey's trade expansion predates 2022. Ankara points to its active mediation between Russia and Ukraine as evidence of genuine neutrality rather than alignment with either side.