Moscow Planning New Trans-Caucasus Rail Line in Response to Western Efforts to Bypass Russia But Faces Serious Obstacles

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 17 – Moscow is again planning to construct a new Trans-Caucasus mainline railway between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, a project that its advocates say is a matter of national security given the growing volume of trade traffic on Western-backed routes that bypass Russia.

            Final plans are to be announced by the end of this year, although the route likely couldn’t be completed before 2027 ( kavkaz.rbc.ru/kavkaz/freenews/66b06dee9a794709b4588670 and ritmeurasia.ru/news--2024-08-18--novaja-transkavkazskaja-magistral-vygody-ne-tolko-ekonomicheskie-75120).

            But Russian experts are already skeptical about its prospects. Moscow made plans to construct such a route in the 1950s and again in the 1970s but nothing came of either. Now, officials in the Russian capital hope that a Western threat will be sufficient to force Moscow to overcome the topographic and ethnographic difficulties that such a route will face.

            If completed, the new mainline would have to go through some of the most mountainous portions of the North Caucasus and also some of the most ethnically restive, factors that will slow if not stop entirely prospects this time around as well.