[LINK] "From China to Europe without Russia?"

[rfmcdonald]

Someone on my Facebook feed shared an article, at Intersection by Vladislav Inozemtsev, suggesting that Russia may well find itself excluded from various trans-Eurasian transport links by virtue of its lack of preparedness.

In early December, Russian and foreign press published the first mention of a new transport route linking China and Europe which has just come into operation. The partners of the project: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey have offered Chinese industrialists express deliveries of goods to the EU by rail in 8-12 days. On December 12, the first train arrived in Tbilisi from Lianyungang: the train cars which had covered approximately 2,500 km across the territory of Kazakhstan were loaded onto a ferry in Aktau, delivered to Baku before continuing their journey to Georgia along the so-called ‘Iron Silk Road’. Obviously, one train does not make a summer. However, every project, even the largest, starts with a small step.

How efficient the new route will turn out to be and how cost-effective transportation along the route is, remains to be seen. Perhaps, it will suffer the fate of a similar project by Deutsche Bahn and Russian Railways which attempted to offer clients relatively swift (within 16 days) transportation of containers from Beijing to Hamburg along the Trans-Siberian Corridor in January 2008; the experiment was discontinued in 2009 due to unprofitability (hardly surprising, given the start of the crisis). It may turn out that the new project proves its viability. However, no matter what its fate will be, certain vital issues should be tackled today.

The most significant issue is that the new project has served as something of a ‘wake-up call’ for Russia. It is a well-known fact that Moscow has long dreamt of turning Russia into a transit corridor between China and Europe. JSC ‘Russian Railways’ officially launched a project aimed at ‘modernization’ of the Trans-Siberian Railway and BAM (the Baikal-Amur Mainline) in 2014, to which 900 billion rubles was earmarked to be spent over the coming years (I guess, the amount will have to be revisited and increased). The objective was to increase the throughput of the entire Trans-Siberian corridor to 115 million tons of cargo a year, of which up to 10% would be transit. However, let me reiterate, the demand for transit was initially low primarily because transport businesses focused on production in the north-eastern and eastern regions of China which have good seaport infrastructure. Moreover, the length of the route – approximately 9,700 km from let’s say Harbin to Berlin - meant that transportation was extremely expensive and was thereby only suitable for certain, specific types of goods shipments.

Aware of the problem, Russian leaders also offered support to another transit project – the ‘Western China-Western Europe’ highway from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan and then via Martuk towards Orenburg and Ulyanovsk to Moscow and Smolensk and on to Poland via Belarus. Officials claimed that this route had a distinct advantage: throughout the entire journey a container crosses only two borders: that of the Customs Union in Khorgos and that of the EU in Terespol (which was supposed to ensure the promptness of deliveries). However, a problem transpired from the very outset: while Kazakhstan has almost finished laying its section of the highway which is almost 2,400 km long (I will not even mention the Chinese), the Russian partners’ activity has been limited to presenting mock-up models of the planned road in Beijing for all these years and has done nothing in terms of work on the ground. Now, according to the most optimistic estimates, the Central Ring Road will be completed in 2020 at the earliest whereas the road running from the Kazakh border will, by all accounts, only be ‘modernized’ (that is, in fact, it will remain in its present shape: unsuitable for large-scale international transit).