In contemporary conditions of transformation of the world economic system and exacerbation of relations between the States, a problem of Russia’s foreign economic policy development does emerge. The geopolitical situation is becoming one of the key factors determining the content of economic policy. The goal of the project is to determine the key features of evolution of Russian foreign policy within the turbulent geopolitical environment of the second decade of the XXI century.

For a long time Russia earned hard currency by selling oil and gas to Europe and spent a large part of it, buying Chinese consumer and investment products. The politically motivated "Turn to the East" moves slowly and so far has not changed the core model of Russia's participation in the global division of labor. However, agricultural export, nuclear power stations projects, cooperation in aircraft construction demonstrate some progress in bringing slogan to the reality.

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as the integration project has achieved the first successes, but has faced also serious challenges. This article is devoted to the problems which this integration union and its member countries have to deal with. A conclusion is made about the objective predetermination of contradictions within the Union, related to its asymmetric structure and raw material specialization of the economies of the majority of participants.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of sanctions on commodity composition and direction of exports and imports of the Russian Federation. To this end, we use a panel data over 2012–2016 to estimate the three-sector gravity model, which, in addition to standard variables, include dummy variables capturing the effect of sanctions imposed on Russia. Our findings confirm that the Western sanctions have a considerable impact on Russia’s trade pattern.