Uzbekistan's Transport Ministry on Thursday said that it was working on a plan to link Russia to Afghanistan and Pakistan via a multimodal transport corridor and talks were held recently in this regard with the transport ministers of the respective countries.
"Participants at the meeting discussed connecting Central Asian and countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) with South Asian countries via Uzbekistan by developing a multimodal transport corridor, aiming to enhance our country's transit potential," it said in a statement.
The Belarus-Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan multimodal corridor is projected to boost cargo transit and freight transportation besides saving billions of dollars due to short trade routes between these nations.
This comes in the backdrop of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) agreed upon during the meeting of the transport forum of Uzbekistan, Russia, and Kazakhstan held under the aegis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) last year.
It is worth noting that Tashkent previously achieved great success through the initialization of a transport corridor between Uzbekistan and Pakistan which passes through Afghanistan.
After Islamabad and Tashkent announced the formalization of a transit trade agreement following the Taliban's* return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, cargo transport between the two nations surged considerably. While 675,000 tonnes of cargo and freight traffic moved between Uzbekistan and Pakistan in 2022, it touched nearly a million tonnes the next year.
For 2024, Uzbekistan is pushing hard to breach the 1 million tonnes barrier.
*under UN sanctions