Russia urgently asks Kazakhstan for help after Turkey refused to transit sanctioned goods

Kazakhstan is facing a surge in requests from Russian companies for help circumventing Western sanctions, Reuters reported, citing seven people directly familiar with the situation.

According to them, in recent weeks, Russian business has literally “inundated” Kazakh contractors with proposals for joint work. The idea is to organize the supply of goods, including sanctioned ones – from aircraft spare parts to rare earth metals from Australia.

Interest in transit through Kazakhstan has skyrocketed after problems with the transit of sanctioned cargo in Turkey, Reuters sources say.

Having become the largest country bypassing Western restrictions and tripling deliveries to Russia over the past year, Turkey stopped processing customs documents for goods destined for the Russian Federation in early March. A Turkish official told Bloomberg that the decision was related to sanctions.

According to VPost, on March 14, Turkish transit started working again. However, customs officials have extended the list of restrictions to include goods that were included in the latest sanctions packages. Thus, the European Union has banned the supply of many types of equipment and electronics to Russia: power generators, pumps, binoculars, radars, snowmobiles, spare parts for trucks. And the United States banned the supply of consumer electronics and household appliances above $300, including over 25% of American technology.

Reuters sources believe that the problems on the Turkish side have not been fully resolved. And the “boom” for transit through Kazakhstan is “only beginning”, one of them emphasizes.

The list of goods that Russia needs includes industrial equipment, bearings for carriages, advanced electronics, radio engineering, turbines, spare parts and even materials for the production of bank cards.

Last year, exports from Kazakhstan to Russia increased by a quarter, to USD 8.8 billion. At the same time, the supply of some rare goods increased several times: bearings doubled, plastic tripled.