Russia Now has Only 50,000 km of Fully-Maintained Internal Waterways, Far Less than when Putin came to Power

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Apr. 2 – Far more than almost any other country, Russia depends on its domestic waterways, including both rivers and canals, to carry cargo and people. It has 100,000 km of these waterways, but then only half are kept fully operational by increasingly frequent dredging in response to the impact of global warming and falling water levels.
    These figure is less than a third of the length of navigable waterways the Russian government claimed in 2000, the year Putin came to power, and means that getting cargo to many places is increasingly difficult (fedpress.ru/article/3372440 and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/03/length-of-russias-navigable-riverways.html).
    The problem is especially great in the basins of the major rivers of Siberia like the Lena and the Ob, where there are no economically viable alternatives – no highways or railways -- to rivers for moving most goods and even people around. Consequently, along many of those river routes deliveries are becoming less regular and prices rising.
    Those trends are adding to the problems that are driving ever more people to leave these regions and preventing others from moving there. Moscow is promising to dredge more rivers and canals and build some 2,000 more riverboats before the end of this decade; but it is unlikely to achieve the increases in the movement of cargo and passengers it is now promising.
    When analysts consider transportation problems in the Russian Federation, these river routes are often ignored. But given that country’s absence of roads and railways in many places, the problems of internal waterways are going to become ever more important, especially if Moscow fails to keep its promises about development.
    For background on Russia’s riverine network and its problems, see  windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/08/russian-river-highways-east-of-urals.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/02/russias-failure-to-develop-its.html and windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2011/05/window-on-eurasia-russias-once-proud.html.