Brooks says a $46 billion rise in China's exports to seven countries may partly reflect goods headed to Russia, linking the trade growth to Moscow's wartime reliance on Chinese supplies.
In an Oct. 19 Substack post, Robin J Brooks put China's shipments to Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan at $66 billion for the first nine months of 2026. The total was $20 billion in the same period of 2019, which Brooks chose as a benchmark before the pandemic and the uneven recovery that followed.
China's direct exports to Russia reached $98 billion during the 2026 period, up from $36 billion seven years earlier, Brooks wrote. That $62 billion increase means the $46 billion gain across the seven other markets was about 75% as large.
Brooks interpreted the breadth of the growth across those markets as a sign that some Chinese goods may have continued on to Russia, rather than being bought for use in each destination. The export totals measure shipments to the seven countries; his proposed onward route is an interpretation of those figures, not a count of confirmed deliveries to Russia.
He said the comparison may leave out other routes through which Chinese products could reach Russia and identified Turkey as one example. His $46 billion figure covers the increase in exports to the seven named countries, not shipments through every possible transit point.
Brooks linked Russia's wartime shift in production to greater dependence on Chinese supplies. He characterized China's role in providing goods to Russia as complicity in the war in Ukraine.
He also argued that a prolonged war benefits China by straining relations between the United States and its European allies. Brooks cited what he described as weak European enforcement of sanctions on goods routed to Russia and the failure to transfer frozen Russian foreign exchange reserves to Ukraine.
