RUSSIA’S ROADS ARE GOING EAST NOW

First, the President Vladimir Putin, driving a Lada car, has tested the newly constructed last remaining link of the speedway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. That road leads to the West of Moscow. But, right after that, he also pushed a button, opening by video yet another modern link of the same highway, leading to the East of Moscow, to Ural mountains, Siberia and the Far East.

These two links, but mostly the second one, are important. The thing is, says Dmitry Skvortsov, an economist writing about logistics and transport links, historically all the main Russian roads were going West. That has been so for the last 300 years. But today we are witnessing a monumental change in the whole orientation of the Russian state and nation. Russia is not only looking East (and South), as in taking interest and debating the merits of these regions. Russia is pouring cement into the steel constructions of the brand-new roads going to the mentioned East and South. Debate on geopolitics is over, it’s hard and fast business now.

Let’s see what Vladimir Putin is saying about the meaning of these two links to the speedway. Today’s event, says the President, is part of the implementation of our plans and international agreements on the development of the Eurasian road network, the Russian section of the Europe-Western China route from St Petersburg to Orenburg and the Sagarchin international automobile checkpoint to Kazakhstan and on to the People’s Republic of China. Other far-reaching system-wide plans call for the further development of the Russia and North-South transport corridors, said he.

And here are some additions to the subject from Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, attending the same ceremony. He evokes an agreement of the year 2014, endorsed by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to build a Europe-Western China route, 9,000 kilometers long, with 2,400 kilometers of it passing across the Russian Federation. Today, says Khusnullin, with this project launched, 67 percent of the road has four or more lanes, meaning it is a full-fledged expressway. Eventually, that expressway will connect the Yellow Sea, the city of Lianyungang, to St Petersburg. Today’s bypass is an important part of this project.

All that means that we are not only talking about one long and winding road. There are two of these, looking like a cross on Eurasia’s map, that’s East-West and North-South routes. The mentioned second transport link, just opened to the east of Moscow, sits in the middle of that cross, going over the powerful Volga River, with a new bridge and elevation 3,700 meters long. Simply speaking, East-West is about Russia and China, while North-South is about Russia and India, with vast regions around the two Asian giants.

The North-South project is also actively moving on, adds Mr. Skvortsov. The recent months and weeks have seen some new links of railways of Iran and Azerbaijan, more are coming. That also means facilitating of Russian trade with the Persian Gulf and other Arab states, but mostly that link is about India.

There are two ways of looking at these happenings, namely, a mundane and a historically monumental ones. Mundane is about my wife’s business, which is logistics. For years and years she has been facilitating moving all kind of cargoes, often arranging a reload of these bulky and fragile things from a ship to a carriage or a huge road-plying truck. In the past, it mostly was easier, faster and cheaper to get a cargo from China or Japan by sea, around Europe, to St. Petersburg or other sea harbors in the Baltics. From there, it had to be delivered to Russian cities by land. And, mind you, these cities were mostly in Russia’s West, since Russia – to remind - has been Europe-oriented for centuries.

Now it’s different. More and more cargoes are crossing the Eurasian land mass in all directions. And every new highway link or a cargo terminal is making such operations cheaper and faster.

Now, if you love geopolitics and history, if you enjoy all these thick volumes telling us how the world is changing, this is your field day that never ends. You may read all these clever things about “land power” and “sea power”, about the West, choking other nations’ trade across the land mass, and developing the Western world based on the sea routes. And you may wonder if the time of the “sea power” is over, or not quite.

While if you only talk about Russian history, you never stop wondering how it happened that Russia became European at all. There was that emperor, Peter the Great (ruled in 1682 – 1725), who is still very popular with some folks in Russia for forcefully chopping a so-called window to Europe. That window was the new city of St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, that the emperor built on the territories taken after many years of war with Europeans.

People like me keep on asking, why couldn’t he have chopped that window or two to all kind of Asian regions, instead. The answer, of course, is simple. Asia was falling in big disrepair and decay at the time, with European powers subjugating these or that parts of the Orient. Now we see a similar disrepair in the West.

In any case, it was after Peter the Great when the main Russian roads, and goods, mostly began to go West and vice versa. And now is the end of that era.

Finding and making new trade routes has always been about beautiful dreams, with plenty of hopes and suppositions of profits. But it is no dream at all, when we see that even with the old routes Russo-Indian trade has grown 1.8 times in 2023. Then there is Russo-Chinese trade, with its growth by 26% in the same year, up to 240 billion dollars. And Russia’s trade with all kind of Middle Eastern nations go up, annually, by 50, 60% or more. Similar things happen with trade of some of the mentioned nations between each other. In such cases, it’s impossible not to upgrade your trade corridors with such partners, while these investments in infrastructure recoup themselves very fast.

Naturally, one may hope that one sunny day the West stops its attempts to “contain” Russia, by a tug of war as we see it now. And then all the new trade links will also stretch to Europe and profit Europe, too.

But it seems it will take a long time for Europe, not to mention the US, to overcome their current systemic crisis. In the meantime the world is doing fine, developing new ways of reaching destinations with all kind of cargoes.