Russia's trade surplus with the 38 countries tracked by Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank, climbed from roughly $8-14 billion in January 2026 to $17-21 billion by April, according to the institute's own Russian foreign trade tracker. On its face, that is a strange trajectory for an economy that has spent more than four years under some of the most extensive sanctions regimes ever assembled. The more useful question isn't whether the surplus grew. It's who is actually buying, because the answer reveals how thoroughly global trade flows have rerouted around the sanctions architecture rather than being constrained by it.
The EU Sanctions Worked. The Rerouting Didn't Stop.
Start with the one relationship where the sanctions regime has functioned close to as intended. Russia's trade balance with the EU27 has stayed near flat or slightly negative for Russia across every month tracked this year, a clear sign that direct European trade with Russia has genuinely been suppressed. That is the part of the sanctions story that gets the most attention, and it's real.
What gets far less attention is where the volume that used to flow through Europe actually went. Russia's trade surplus with India jumped from under $300 million in January to roughly $7 billion in April, an acceleration sharp enough to suggest a step change rather than a gradual drift, consistent with India continuing to absorb Russian crude at a discount and re-export refined products into markets that would never touch Russian-origin barrels directly. Turkey shows the same pattern at smaller scale but with more consistency, Russia's surplus there growing in every single month from January through May, doubling from roughly $0.6 billion to nearly $4 billion at its peak. Brazil and Kazakhstan both show steady, if smaller, growth in the same direction.
China Is the Complicated Exception
The one relationship that doesn't fit the "Russia is finding new buyers" narrative is Russia's largest and most politically significant trading partner. Russia actually runs a persistent and widening trade deficit with China, not a surplus, according to the same Bruegel data, a gap that widened from roughly $4.5 billion in April to $6.5 billion in May. Russia is buying more from China, machinery, electronics, vehicles, than it is selling back, even as China remains the most visible symbol of Russia's post-sanctions pivot eastward. That distinction matters for how to read the broader realignment: Russia's growing overall surplus isn't being generated by its relationship with its most prominent remaining major-power partner. It's being generated by a wider set of smaller, less scrutinized relationships, India and Turkey chief among them, that have absorbed the volume Europe stopped taking.
Turkey's Role Just Got More Concrete
Turkey's growing trade surplus with Russia isn't happening in isolation from the rest of the region's energy story. Turkey and Iraq signed a one-year deal this month reopening the pipeline to Ceyhan on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, restoring daily capacity of 750,000 barrels with a confirmed transit tariff of $1.62 a barrel, a route that lets Iraqi crude reach global markets without passing anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz. Turkey is simultaneously becoming a growing outlet for Russian trade and a physical alternative export corridor for Gulf crude avoiding the maritime chokepoint that has dominated headlines all year. Both roles reinforce the same underlying position: Ankara has spent this period of sustained regional instability making itself more structurally important to global energy and trade flows, not less, regardless of which specific conflict or sanctions regime is generating the disruption in any given month.
What This Actually Means
The lesson isn't that sanctions have failed outright. The EU relationship shows they can genuinely suppress direct trade when enforcement is credible and the political will to sustain it exists. The lesson is narrower and more specific: trade volume under sanction pressure doesn't disappear, it reroutes, and the countries willing to absorb that rerouted volume, India and Turkey most visibly in this dataset, gain real economic leverage in the process, becoming more central to global flows precisely because they were willing to be the ones still buying when others stopped. For investors and policymakers thinking about where the next round of sanctions enforcement, secondary tariffs, or geopolitical realignment gets aimed, this data offers a fairly direct answer: not at Russia's largest trading partner, but at the smaller, less scrutinized relationships that have quietly absorbed the volume everyone assumed sanctions had eliminated.
Trade data cited above is drawn from Bruegel's Russian Foreign Trade Tracker, the most recent edition covering data through May 2026. Additional context on Turkey-Iraq pipeline capacity is drawn from Iraqi state oil marketing officials.
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