This paper is a back-of-the-envelope attempt to assess the losses that German agri-food exporters encountered due to the Russian import ban that was introduced in August 2014 and recently has been extended for at least one more year. Looking at exports in a time-series perspective it is shown that exporters’ losses due to the boycott itself are not that severe if two earlier episodes of rather drastic export reductions are taken into account: first, due to Russian import restrictions of meat and milk products in 2013 and second, due to an increased uncertainty in European-Russian trade relations as the Ukrainian conflict escalated and sides exchanged the very first sanctions. The results suggest that although the import ban had a negative impact on German agri-food exports to Russia, its extent was not as large as one may guesstimate without considering a broader picture of trade barriers imposed by Russia on German exporters in the recent years.