South Korea, Japan and Taiwan have begun to gradually abandon coal from Russia, but they still cannot do it completely, Kommersant writes, citing customs statistics.

Japan and Taiwan are cutting supplies the fastest. The first bought 8.4 million tons of coal, which is 25 percent less than a year ago. Taiwan reduced imports by 33.3 percent to 4.4 million tons. South Korea imported 12.8 million (down three percent).

The strategy for the development of the coal industry in Russia assumed, even in a conservative scenario, an increase in supplies to the countries of East Asia from 84 million tons in 2018 to 123 million tons by 2035. Japan has already announced that it plans to completely ban the import of Russian coal. South Korea wants to increase supplies from Australia by 1.5 times in order to reduce dependence on Russia. Taiwan's state-owned power company Taipower has no plans to enter into new coal deals.

Japan and South Korea have historically been the largest consumers of Russian thermal and coking coal, said Boris Krasnozhenov of Alfa Bank.