Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statement that “If peppers are spoiling, I’ll pay for those peppers. If roses are spoiling, I’ll pay for them, too” was an emotionally-charged outburst that was tied to the restrictions imposed by Russia on a number of Armenian agricultural exports in May. With about three months since these sanctions were levied, we have some hard data to assess how effective they have been or, taking Yerevan’s point of view, how successful Armenia has been in diverting agricultural trade to other destinations.
From shock to adaptation
The key number I look is what I call the replacement ratio, i.e., the increase in exports to non-Russian destinations divided by the volume of lost exports to Russia. On that measure, Armenia replaced only 15% of lost Russian fresh-produce volume in June, the first full month of disruption. However, July saw a meaningful improvement to 48.5% and provisional August data points to a something in the 37-47% range.
The improvement is definitely not trivial. It shows that agricultural exporters were able to react reasonably quickly, find alternative export destinations and redirect at least part of their produce. It is also true, however, that a significant portion of the former Russian business remains unreplaced. If we take June and July together, Russia-bound shipments in the critical fresh-produce basket fell by 56,282 tonnes (Table 1). Additional shipments to other markets rose by 17,987 tonnes. In other words, only 32% of the Russian loss was replaced, leaving roughly 38,300 tonnes — or 68% of the lost Russian volume — unfilled.
The maths behind that calculation is important to catch. Simply looking at total non-Russia exports would exaggerate the adjustment because some of those exports existed before the onset of the export shock. What matters is the incremental volume that was gained after the imposition of restrictions.
The July rebound was for real as fresh-produce exports rose to 17,183 tonnes from 8,070 tonnes in June. More importantly, the total export shortfall versus the same month of 2025 narrowed sharply, while additional non-Russia exports climbed to about 13,800 tonnes. Non-Russia exports in July were roughly five times larger than the corresponding period of last year.
Table 1: About 32% of lost fresh produce exports to Russia were replaced over June-July
The apricot problem
But the aggregate numbers also conceal exceptional concentration.
Peaches, nectarines and sweet cherries performed exceptionally well. In July, additional exports to non-Russian destinations were actually larger than the volumes lost to Russia, producing replacement ratios above 100%. Total shipments of those products were also around 30% above their July 2025 levels.
Apricots told the opposite story — and it dominated the overall result
Apricot exports dropped from 42,902 tonnes in June-July 2025 to 10,376 tonnes during the same of period of 2026. That 32,527-tonne decline accounted for a hefty 85% of the net fresh-produce shortfall. Tomatoes and plums/cherry plums added most of the remaining weakness.
There could be an important catch here as the apricot collapse may not be entirely about Russia. Armenia’s economy minister pointed to frost, hail and heavy rain as reasons for a weaker harvest. A useful sensitivity test adds some weight to that argument: excluding apricots raises the June-July replacement ratio from 32% to 70%, and July’s ratio to 76%.
But that does not make the Russian restrictions irrelevant. Rather, two shocks appear to be overlapping: a market-access shock and a supply shock. It is, however, hard to disentangle the two effects without an independent harvest data.
Diversification — but where?
The geography of new export destinations is equally revealing for interpreting the results. Armenia is diversifying, but mostly within its broader (CIS) region, rather than making a dramatic leap into high-income Western markets.
Georgia and Uzbekistan together accounted for 66.5% of the incremental non-Russia gain in June-July (Table 2). Add Ukraine and the share rises to 82.4%. Uzbekistan was the largest destination by 2026 fresh-produce volume in the data, with Georgia generating the largest incremental increase.
The EU, by contrast, accounted for only 4.1% of the incremental gain.
That could potentially change. The EU has already moved to provide temporary trade preferences for Armenian products following Russia’s 2026 restrictions, potentially improving access to the European market.
But for now, Armenia’s export adaptation is overwhelmingly a regional story, not yet a European one.
There are also sectors where adaptation has been far less robust. Flowers, for example, look superficially stable in absolute shipments as the July’s replacement ratio was a mere 8.1%. Fish is even more concerning: exports fell from 823 tonnes in July 2025 to just 64 tonnes in July 2026, with additional non-Russia shipments replacing a paltry 6.1% of the Russian shortfall. A 60-tonne shipment of fish and products to the UAE announced in early September is encouraging, but still far too small and recent to talk about a durable alternative market.
Table 2: Uzbekistan, Georgia and Ukraine account for 82.4% of all incremental gain in fresh-produce exports
The investor takeaway: volume is not revenue
The central message may be one of partial adaptation without full diversification. The data weaken a claim that Armenian exporters cannot find alternative export destinations. Equally, they fail to support a claim that the Russian market has already been replaced or that the Russia-related trade risk can be removed from consideration.
Exporters have shown decent flexibility, and the improvement from June to July has been reasonably large. August, while incomplete, does not suggest that this adaptation suddenly reversed.
But there is an important catch: volume is not revenue. Exporters may be selling into new markets at different prices and with higher freight, spoilage, financing and working-capital costs. Government compensation may also affect the economics. A tonne redirected to Georgia, Uzbekistan or the UAE is not necessarily economically equivalent to a tonne previously sold in Russia. That makes it dangerous to translate the 32% volume replacement ratio mechanically into an equivalent recovery in export earnings.
This is precisely why the Russian market cannot yet be treated as “replaced” in any meaningful sense.
The most defensible conclusion then is somewhere in between the two extremes. Armenia has certainly demonstrated better capacity to re-route exports than the initial shock suggested. On the other hand, the adjustment is not yet fully realised, since it is rather localised in few products and very dependent on regional markets.
The Russia-related trade risks may have become a little less for now, but to say that they no longer exist at all would certainly be too early. The next test that lies ahead could perhaps be the most crucial one – whether the new trade routes of trade will stand the test of time or not.
Ivan Tchakarov is partner for the Caucasus and Central Asia at GlobalSource Partners.