War and Trade: The International Commercial Fallout of the Ukraine Conflict

This thesis investigates how the 2022 escalation of the Russia–Ukraine war reshaped international trade flows of both countries, with particular attention to their major commercial partners and key commodity groups. To achieve this, UN Comtrade data was used from 2018 to 2024 and the fixed-effects panel model to identify the conflict’s direct influence on import and export patterns. The model accounts for factors such as unobserved heterogeneity, geopolitical alignment, and structural trade differences. The study results reveal that Russia’s trade has been strongly redirected away from the EU and the US, with China stepping up as Russia’s main commercial substitute in both imports and exports. Ukraine, notwithstanding considerable logistical dysfunction and destruction of industrial regions and maritime infrastructure, has kept its overall import levels by quickly moving to EU-based suppliers while its exports have been cut down sharply but partially absorbed by European markets through new overland "solidarity lanes." The analysis at the commodity level shows uneven effects of the war: Russian energy exports were impacted by sanctions but remained strong while the sectors linked to Western value chains perished. For Ukraine, imports of energy increased while industrial and transport-related goods decreased. The conclusion among others is that the war caused a deep and broad geographical and sectoral restructuring of trade, which not only accelerated the Russian move towards non-Western partners but, on the contrary, already deepened Ukraine’s economic integration with the EU.