Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 8 – Vladimir Putin’s
regime routinely hypes the Northern Sea Route as the future of east-west trade,
but a review of the situation by the influential Russian military journal, Voyennoye
Obozreniye, suggests that the route isn’t going to play the role the
Kremlin envisages, a view that Western analysts increasingly share.
Russian military analyst Yevgeny
Fedorov notes that the possibilities of the Northern Sea Route depend on the
development of Russia’s Far North and that such development is not only
prohibitively expensive but is unlikely to happen anytime soon (topwar.ru/181753-arkticheskij-uzel-nuzhen-li-rossii-severnyj-morskoj-put.html).
The Russian North occupies 18
percent of the country’s territory but has only two percent of Russia’s
population. The ports and cities that do exist there were created in Soviet
times as part of a grandiose plan to transform the environment. But they do not
pay their own way. Instead, they require massive subsidies to this day.
That has presented the current
Russian leaders with a challenge, Fedorov says. No one intends to “throw the Arctic
to the winds of fate.” The natural wealth of the region is too great for that.
But “to continue developing the region on ‘the Soviet model’ is also something
that no one intends to do either.”
The Putin government has chosen to
move forward with a public-private partnership involving Russia’s giant oil and
gas companies. The latter have promoted the idea that Russia should not develop
cities in the North or roads and railways across melting permafrost regions but
rather take out the resources via the Northern Sea Route.
This looks like the perfect
solution. But Fedorov says, it is attractive only in theory.
Between 2015 and 2020, Moscow
planned to develop the region around a series of localized centers, but then it
decided instead to promote the development of the region as a single
macro-region. “This means that the Russian leadership has in part returned to
the Soviet model of development everywhere in the Arctic.”
“In large measure,” the analyst
continues, “this is connected with the hopes for the development of yet another
regional mega-project – the Northern Sea Route. The government’s plans for it
are simply grandiose” with Moscow assuming that such a route can easily compete
against the Suez Canal and its own Trans-Siberian railway.
Global warming has only added to the
self-confidence of Moscow planners, but in fact, the Northern Sea Route remains
problematic. The remaining ice requires the existence of icebreakers which even
Russia does not have enough of, the opening of new ports for ships to put in at,
and a radically expanded navigation aids system.
Backers of the plan like to speak of
speeds of 15 knots an hour for ships using the route, something which would
mean that the time between Europe and Asia would be much shorter than on the
Suez route, but in fact, the real speeds now possible are only nine knots and
thus the transit time is the same for the Northern Sea Route as for the Suez Canal
one.
“But that is not all,” Fedorov says.
Container vessels, an increasingly important part of oceanic trade, need to go
into ports for resupply ever three to four thousand kilometers. But there are no ports that ships can use
from one end of the Northern Sea Route to the other. Building them would be
prohibitively expensive.
Experts say, he continues, that
“from Vladivostok to Rotterdam itself, there is not a single major port capable
of receiving container vessels of world class” and that Russia would have to
build 16 large ports to make such shipping possible on a regular basis. (The
reason container ships have to put in so often is for resupply, of course.)
“Besides these problems, the
Northern Sea Route doesn’t have enough icebreakers. Of the new series, only the
Arktika has entered service.” And global warming as fast as it is
happening isn’t going to eliminate the need for them anytime soon, the Voyennoe
obozreniye analyst says.
He points out that “the main
problems are connected with the extremely weak development of the eastern part
of the Arctic Sea Route. In fact, to the east of Norilsk, there is nothing and
won’t be for many years. There is no infrastructure, no productive capacity,
and no major ports.” Chukotka will get the Internet only in 2024.
The daunting costs and difficulties
of changing all this, Fedorov argues, prompts the question he began with: “Does
Russia need the Northern Sea Route?” Most likely, he suggests, the answer is “no.”
Indeed, if it continues to pursue
its dreams, “Russia risks creating an enormous structure, investing gigantic
means and in the end having a Northern Sea Route that isn’t used. The transformation
of the Arctic into a mega-region is transforming it into an analogue to a
Soviet ‘construction of the century,’” something that will cost a lot and
achieve little.
“Unfortunately or happily, the Arctic
region is not intended as a place where hundreds of thousands or even more
millions of people will live. It is too difficult both for health and of the
budget.” Consequently, plans for the development of the Northern Sea Route
which depends on the development of the Russian North must be scaled back.
Not unimportantly, concerns about
the cost of shipping along the Northern Sea Route, its environmental impact,
and declining demand are now being sounded by Western analysts as well, but
their voices are often overwhelmed by Russian hype and by those in the West who
are using that hype to justify their own plans (thebarentsobserver.com/ru/arktika/2021/04/rossiyskie-usiliya-po-prodvizheniyu-sevmorputi-vstrecheny-skepticheski).
