Moscow Backs Khabarovsk Plan to Restore Amur as Domestic and International Waterway

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 22 – The Russian Presidential Administration has approved a plan drawn up by Khabarovsk Kray governor Dmitry Demeshin to restore the Amur River which separates the Russian Far East from China as a major route for trade, a status it had before 1991 but has lost since the USSR disintegrated.

            Prior to the end of the Soviet Union, the Amur River carried as much as 26 million tons of cargo between the two countries and more than 500 million tons domestically between Russian ports; but by the mid-2010s, that annual amount had fallen to a tiny fraction of that, Artyom Aleksandrov of the Siberian Economist portal says (sibmix.com/?doc=18974).

            Reversing that trend is now a matter of priority given Putin’s turn to the east, and both Khabarovsk and Moscow hope that the amount of trade passing across the Amur either by new bridges or ports and riverways capable of operating even when water levels reach seasonal lows will be seven or more times what it was before 1991.

            Chinese businesses and officials welcome this initiative, Aleksandrov says, a good thing because they will likely have to bear much of the costs of this project given the Russian government’s current financial stringencies that have arisen as a result of Putin’s expanded and continuing war in Ukraine.