DUSHANBE, December 30. /TASS/. Russian regions ramped up cooperation with Tajikistan in 2022 and the number of business missions from different cities and regions of the Russian Federation visiting the Central Asian republic doubled compared to 2021, Head of the Russian trade mission in Tajikistan Yevgeny Korenkov said in an interview with TASS on Friday.
"The number of visits from Russian regions has increased. If in 2021 there were six, this year delegations from St. Petersburg and Moscow, Dagestan, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the Sverdlovsk, Penza, Kirov, Samara, Kaliningrad, Ivanovo and Omsk regions visited us," he detailed.
Such activity between the regions affected the structure of Russian exports to the Central Asian country, Korenkov added. "Despite the fact that Moscow remained the trade leader, the roles of other substituent entities were substantially redistributed," he noted. For example, the Sverdlovsk Region ensured almost 10% of Russia’s non-resource non-energy exports to Tajikistan, up by 3 percentage points, while the Samara Region and the Republic of Bashkortostan, unlike the rating of 2021, were among the top regions, each of them ensuring 3% of similar export supplies, the trade envoy pointed out.
Some 67 Russian regions were involved in joint trade activities with Tajikistan in 2020-2022. That said, 12 regions accounted for almost 80% of all trade turnover with the republic, among them St. Petersburg, the Moscow, Leningrad and Chelyabinsk Regions, with Moscow and the Krasnoyarsk and Sverdlovsk Regions being the top three trade partners. Active cooperation between the regions affected trade turnover between Russia and Tajikistan, which demonstrated stable growth over the past years. In the first 11 months of 2022 trade turnover soared by 35% year-on-year, surpassing $1.5 bln for the first time ever.