Airport in Pevek, Asian Gateway to NSR, Not Linked by Road to Anywhere Else Except when Rivers Freeze, Can’t Handle Planes Larger than Boeing 737s

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 3 – Moscow has long insisted and many in the West have accepted as fact that Russia can supply settlements in the far north not connected by year-round roads by means of ships and airplanes, something critical for the operation and development of the Northern Sea Route.  

            Few roads or railroads are likely to be built anytime soon because of both the enormous distances involved compared to population and even more because the melting of the permafrost means that any roads and railways built there will have to be reconstructed constantly (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/12/permafrost-melting-damaging-key.html).

But neither ships nor airplanes can solve the problems of these cities. Ships can carry heavy cargo, but Russia does not have enough icebreakers to keep most of these ports open and it faces problems with the silting up of rivers on which the ports are located, limiting this channel (https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/02/global-warming-isolating-cities-across.html, https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/01/even-russian-ports-along-northern-sea.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/sixty-percent-of-population-points-in.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/06/moscow-talks-about-promoting-north-and.html).

Consequently, Moscow is forced to rely on airplanes, an extremely expensive way to move heavy cargo and one that faces serious problems on the ground because the number of airports in the north have been cut  (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/12/russia-now-has-fewer-civilian-airports.html) and because of problems with the airports that do remain.

These difficulties are forcing Moscow to spend enormous sums to try to correct them as the case with Pevek, a settlement that had 12,000 residents at the end of Soviet times but only 4,000 and is celebrated as the eastern gateway of the Northern Sea Route in Chukotka despite having a single runway capable of handling relatively small planes (sibmix.com/?doc=19372).

Indeed, officials there say that the largest plane the settlement’s airport can handle is the Boeing 737 which has a cargo carrying capacity of only 23 tons. To bring in construction materials and other supplies thus requires an enormous number of flights and in some cases is prohibitively expensive.

But unless Moscow continues to spend money in this way, it won’t be able to open Siberian rivers to transit for goods between China and the central sections of the NSR; and China will likely develop the NSR on its own further from Russian shores, reducing Russia’s dominance of the region.