Western share of foreign visitors to Russian events halves, but West still leads
Western countries remain the largest single group among international participants at events held in Russia in 2025, according to research by the consultancy Polylog, cited by RBC.
The study analysed 485 large international events held between 2019 and 2025. Foreign participation was counted where a foreign company exhibited at a trade fair, where official delegations or experts took part in a forum, conference or summit, or where foreign teams or competitors took part in sporting or cultural events.
To assess the trend in Western participation, researchers grouped countries into macro-regions and calculated each region's share of total participants by year. Although the Western share halved over seven years — from 53 % in 2019, before the pandemic, to 22 % in 2025 — delegates from Western countries still outnumbered those from any other single region.
The study used 2019 as its baseline, when about 3,200 foreign delegations took part in Russian events. In 2022 the events industry was hit by the start of the military conflict in Ukraine; that year just over 1,000 foreign delegations took part in Russian events, 67 % fewer than in 2019.
Among Western countries, Italy showed the greatest interest in Russian events, the study found. Across all countries, however, China was the largest single source of participants.
Delegates from post-Soviet states accounted for 19 % of participants at Russian events in 2025: the Middle East accounted for a further 17 %, South and South-East Asia for 14 %, Africa for 11 %, East Asia for 10 %, and Latin America for 7 %.
Overall, the number of foreign delegations in 2025 remained 30 % below the 2019 level. Polylog's analysts forecast that the pre-pandemic level will be matched within the next few years, and that an improvement in the international climate could accelerate that recovery further.
Experts involved in the study expect both the number of international events in Russia and the number of foreign delegations attending them to keep growing, with most new participants likely to come from China, India, Egypt, Brazil, Turkey and other countries of the global South. Western participation, Polylog forecast, would remain limited but was not expected to disappear entirely.
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20.07.26