The Swedish government instructed the country’s Chamber of Commerce to check the reasons for the sharp increase in exports to countries neighboring the Russian Federation. In a statement from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is reported that these statistics may be related to attempts to circumvent anti-Russian sanctions. The Minister of Foreign Trade of Sweden, Johan Forssell, emphasized that if Western countries seek to weaken Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, then sanctions must be observed.
According to the Swedish Statistics Bureau, in 2023 the volume of exports from Sweden to Kazakhstan increased by 140% compared to the previous year and to Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan by 200%. The Embassy of Kazakhstan in Sweden reported that the trade turnover between these two countries in January-November 2022 amounted to $282M, almost 40% higher than the previous year’s period. At the same time, exports from Sweden to Kazakhstan increased by 22.3%, amounting to $189.3M.