"Our trade and economic relations continue to be on the rise,” Russia’s Alexei Overchuk said during a meeting in Moscow of a Russian-Armenian intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation. “At least I will say that mutual trade between our countries is reaching new records.”
Its total amount more than doubled to $10.2 billion in the first ten months of this year, added Overchuk. Armenia’s Statistical Committee reported an even higher figure: almost $10.9 billion, which is up by 91 percent from the same period of 2023.
“The almost twofold increase in trade is impressive,” Armenian Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian told journalists after the session of the commission co-headed by him and Overchuk. “We hope that another double-digit growth will be recorded by the next commission meeting.”
An Armenian government statement quoted Grigorian as saying during the meeting: “I would like to once again reaffirm our firm commitment to … fully realizing the existing potential for the consistent development of cooperation between Armenia and Russia.”
The two vice-premiers said they discussed ways of further facilitating commercial links between their countries. Overchuk spoke of “a number of issues related to improving transport links between Armenia and Russia.”
Bilateral trade has skyrocketed since the February 2022 outbreak of the war in Ukraine, with Armenian entrepreneurs taking advantage of Western sanctions against Moscow to re-export many Western-manufactured goods to Russia.
Also, Armenia appears to have become this year a conduit for exports of Russian gold and diamonds to world markets and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular. This has been the main driving force behind the doubling of Russian-Armenian trade recorded in January-October 2024.
Armenian government data shows that Russian exports to Armenia tripled in the ten-month period to nearly $8.3 billion. The South Caucasus country in turn reported a sixfold surge in its exports to the UAE worth about $4.9 billion.
Russian officials regularly stress the benefits for the Armenian economy of having tariff-free access to Russia’s vast market guaranteed by membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Some of them have warned that Armenia will risk losing not only that access but also a significant discount on the price of Russian natural gas if Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government continues reorienting the country towards the West.
Pashinian has frozen Armenia’s membership in another Russian-led bloc, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and said its formal withdrawal from the military alliance of ex-Soviet states is only a matter of time. But he has been careful not to signal its eventual exit from the EEU as well.
Pashinian praised the trade bloc when he chaired a meeting of the prime ministers of its member states in Moscow last week. An Armenian deputy economy minister noted earlier that Armenia’s annual exports to the other EEU member states have increased more than tenfold ever since it joined the bloc in 2015. Russia has absorbed the bulk of those exports.
