Economic sanctions between the European Union (EU) and Russia in early 2014 led to a reduction of 10.7 percent in EU exports to Russia until 2016, a new Austrian study has revealed.
The study says that when factoring in a weakening of the Russian economy, the decline may be even as great as 15.7 percent annually over the given time frame.
In 2013 total EU exports to Russia amounted to 120 billion euros (140 billion U.S. dollars), which by 2016 had fallen to just 72 billion euros (84 billion U.S. dollars).
The study attributes about 40 percent of the lost exports to the results of the sanctions.
This led to Russia slipping from the fourth-most important trading partner of the EU to the fifth, behind the U.S., Switzerland, China, and Turkey.