Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Moscow Boasts about Bridges to China and North Korea but Fails to Build Roads Leading to Them or Train Enough Logistics Experts

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 30 – The week doesn’t go by that one or another Moscow media outlet boasts about highway and rail bridges Russia is opening between itself, on the one hand, and China and North Korea, on the other. But Russian experts concede that these bridges aren’t being used as much as they could be because of the absence of road and rail networks leading to them.
    On the Russian side of these two borders, Moscow has failed to build sufficient highways or rail lines to handle the traffic that the Russian government hopes for and boasts of. As a result, it is now struggling to catch up; but it is unclear whether any crash program will achieve a breakthrough soon (ritmeurasia.ru/news--2024-12-30--mosty-druzhby-rossijanam-stanovitsja-vse-legche-ezdit-v-kitaj-i-kndr-77713).
    But even if Moscow does manage to build more highways and rail lines leading up to these border crossings, it faces another problem which likely means they won’t be as effective at linking these countries together as the Kremlin hopes. At present, it can’t fill 20 percent of number of logistics specialists it needs to make such networks operational.
    These two factors – the lack of adequate infrastructure and the shortage of a sufficient number of specialists – have combined, Russian experts say, to create the kind of bottleneck that will severely limit the value of the much-ballyhooed bridges that Moscow and its neighbors are building.

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