The sustainability of international trade is subject to immense pressure. Apart from obstructed logistics, disruption of production chains and changes in demand, the sustainability of international trade is heavily affected by the sanctions caused by the Russia–Ukraine conflict. This paper studies the factors predicting sustainable international trade in the post-Soviet region. We hypothesize that ongoing conflicts, infrastructure, language integration, geographical proximity, common border, and economic wellbeing significantly impact international trade. Methodologically we rely on linear and hierarchical regressions estimating a set of gravitation models (N = 15 countries—104 trading pairs; 2010–2020). The results suggest that Russian as a primary language and the average density of road networks positively predict bilateral trade volume. The geographical distance, infrastructure differences, military conflicts, and, surprisingly, the pair-average GDP per capita diminish bilateral trade. Countries’ GDP mediates the effect of GDP per capita. The results are robust over time. The results present an important insight into sustainable international trade within the region affected by the numerous military conflicts in the past and the war conflict between Russia and Ukraine nowadays. The rebuilding of Ukrainian transport infrastructure is one of the essential measures from the country’s point of view and a factor supporting internationally sustainable food supply.

Although economic growth is always one of the priorities for a country, an ever-growing economy is unsustainable in the long run. Environment protection, public participation in decision-making, and, nowadays, even strong defense forces gain increasing importance for country sustainability. The paper studies trade-offs between national goals as impacted by the population values and attitudes in the post-soviet region. We study a representative dataset from eleven countries (N=20006, age 18+, M ± SD: 46,04 ± 17,07; 58% women, 46,8% upper education). Two indicators are utilized to determine the preferences for economic growth – the growth as the most important priority (the other three being military spending, public participation in social life, and aesthetics of city and countryside) and economic growth at the expense of environmental protection. Methodologically, we rely on correlations and confidence intervals for mean values (95%) analyses to study the associations and the country differences in preferences for economic growth. The results suggest that (1) post-Soviet countries are largely heterogeneous in their preference for economic growth as compared to other priorities, and geographically close countries may have opposing attitudes, and (2) the country-level correlations of the two indicators of preferences for economic growth produced opposite statistically significant correlations in different countries.