High Costs and Increasing Budgetary Stringencies Forcing Moscow to Abandon Plans for New Rail Routes Supporting Northern Sea Route and Trade with China

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 5 – Because of budgetary stringencies arising from Putin’s war in Ukraine, Moscow has decided to postpone and thus effectively cancel the construction of new railways east of the Urals that would have supported the Northern Sea Route and trade with China.

            Moscow has given up for the present on the construction of the North Siberian railway that would expand Russia’s east-west railways in the region now dependent exclusively on the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM). And it has put off plans to build a new north-south route between Tomsk and China (kommersant.ru/doc/8250102).

            The two projects, the first of which was designed to support land support for the Northern Sea Route and the second to promote trade between Russia and China, would have passed through some of the most difficult terrain in the world and were estimated to cost more than 500 billion US dollars.

            These suspensions follow Moscow’s decision in 2023 to put off the construction of the Northern Broad Gage route until the end of this decades (kommersant.ru/doc/6053991).  And the all into question rail projects that Vladimir Putin had earlier celebrated as Russia’s “projects of the decade.”

            The Kremlin may hope that China will provide the funding that Moscow no longer can; but if Beijing does do so, it will almost certainly seek to extract from the Kremlin concessions on access to mineral supplies and insist on the use of Chinese laborers to do the work, both of which will create new problems for relations between the two allies.