Abstract. Economic and geopolitical risks have evolved in such a way as to produce a global slowdown in 2019, with GDP growth rates having fallen to some 2.9 per cent, and global trade growth rates to the record low of 1 per cent. Although the «Phase One» trade deal between the US and China being negotiated by the end of the year brings hopes for resolution of the sharpest contradictions on trade issues between the two countries, the risk of further trade slowdown is still real. In this setting, Russia has to find its own approach to global trade issues to evade both the Scylla of «green protectionism» promoted by the EU as a part of the climate change action, and the Charybdis of the US efforts directed to the revision of the WTO system as it came to be known in recent decades.