Türkiye has sharply reduced its exports to Russia by about a third. This is evidenced by the data official statistics on foreign trade of Turkey.
Thus, based on the results of January-February of this year, Turkish companies supplied goods and services to Russia for a total amount of $1.29 billion. A year earlier, during the same period, exports amounted to more than $2 billion.
It is noteworthy that the volume of imports from Russia to Turkey also decreased by approximately the same amount – according to the results of February, from $2 billion to 1.3 billion year-on-year.
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As a Russian opposition publication writes: The Moscow Times, the reason for such a sharp drop in trade volumes was the risk of secondary sanctions from the United States. Last December, President Joe Biden allowed the US Treasury to impose sanctions on financial organizations from third countries for assistance in servicing transactions involving sanctioned persons from the Russian Federation and for facilitating the supply of equipment to the Russian military-industrial complex.
“After this, banks in Turkey began to reconsider relations with clients from the Russian Federation for fear of losing access to the dollar, which accounts for almost half of global financial transactions. The situation also affected Russian oil exporters, who stopped receiving money for barrels sold to Ankara,” the publication writes.
It is noted that in February, Turkish banks began to close the accounts of ordinary Russian companies, although previously such restrictions applied only to those legal entities that were directly subject to US sanctions.
The Kremlin has already promised to resolve this situation with Turkey, and this has partially been achieved. In the second half of February, some Turkish banks again began servicing direct payments with Russia, but only from the so-called “green list of goods” – food, medicine, agricultural products, textiles.
Relations between Russia and Turkey: latest news
As UNIAN wrote, after the introduction of Western sanctions, Turkey not only did not follow the example of other NATO countries, but, on the contrary, increased trade with Russia. According to numerous journalistic investigations, Turkey has become one of the leading suppliers and transitors of sanctioned goods to Russia. In particular, Turkey provided half of Russia’s imports of nitrocellulose, a key raw material for the production of gunpowder.
But recently relations between the two countries have cooled somewhat. Thus, Türkiye stopped allowing Russian ships with grain and weapons through the Bosphorus. There have been at least several recorded cases where Russians had to turn their ships around and sail back to their port of departure.
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2024-03-03 19:29:00
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