As Project Ukraine collapses, the West’s efforts to “isolate” Russia show no signs of slowing down. So far, they have been ineffective, if not counterproductive, but that doesn’t mean they will end.
Transport and logistics continues to be a major target of the sanctions, which means much of this geopolitical struggle revolves around transit and trade, and for Moscow that means minimizing any dependence on countries hostile to Moscow.
Access to the seas has historically been key for Russia and remains paramount, which is summarized here by Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian political scientist who specializes in Russian foreign policy:
Russia’s economic development was obstructed ever since the disintegration of Kievan Rus as it severed Russia from the maritime arteries of international trade. Russia’s “return to Europe” and subsequently becoming a great power was made possible under Peter the Great by gaining access to the Baltic Sea. Containment of Russia has since relied to some extent on denying Russia reliable access to the sea…
In Europe, NATO has been instrumental to expand US control over the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Arctic. NATO expansion to Bulgaria, Romania and possibly Ukraine aims to convert the Black Sea into a NATO lake. In the Baltic Sea, NATO membership to Baltic states has extended the reach of the US. Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, argued that the pending NATO expansion to Sweden and Finland was a strategic victory because “if we wish, we can block all entry and exit to Russia through St. Petersburg”. The US is also expanding its reach in the high north by converting Norway into a frontline in the Arctic with increased military activity and soon to establish four US military bases on Norwegian soil.
Russia’s goal is to maintain and expand its maritime trade corridors while the West aims to thwart it any way possible. Data from Rosmorrechflot, Russia’s Federal Agency for Sea and Inland Water Transport, show that Russia is winning with 2023 seaport cargo turnover increasing by 7.8 percent in the January-October period compared to the previous year. The following is a brief look at each major sea corridor for Russia and western efforts in the same area.
The Baltic & The Arctic
Despite Western declarations that the Baltic Sea is a “NATO lake”, cargo turnover at Russia’s Baltic seaports, including St. Petersburg, increased by 2.5 percent.
Surging oil exports to China played a major role in the increase. Flows from Russia’s Arctic and Baltic ports to China totaled 10.4 million barrels in the 2023 summer season, data from S&P Global Commodities at Sea showed. That total was up from just 484,000 barrels in 2022 and 2.2 million barrels in 2019 when the first commercial shipments began.
This is still only a fraction of the seaborne Russian crude to China shipped mostly south via the Suez Canal.
A big reason both Moscow and Beijing are working to make the Northern route viable is to have multiple connection routes in the case of direct war with the West or if other corridors suffer from local conflict, as is currently happening now in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The building out of the Northern route is also part of China’s plans to diversify its supply routes in case of any future conflict with the West.
Compared to the Suez route, the Northern route is about a third shorter for Russian Baltic shipments to northern China and about 45 percent shorter for shipments from terminals near the arctic port of Murmansk, but those times can vary due to unpredictable weather and ice.
Still, Moscow is planning on climate change making the route more passable, and Russia has built up its fleet of icebreakers, ships and submarines. According to S&P Global, Russia has three nuclear icebreakers working the Northern Sea Route, plus a nuclear-powered ice-breaking container ship on the route, and other icebreakers under repair. In June, Russia said it planned to build more than 50 icebreakers and ice-class vessels, ports and terminals and other assets over the next 13 years at a cost of $22 billion.
Additionally, according to Silk Road Briefing, “a central hub for building large-capacity offshore structures to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG) on a very large scale is underway based in Murmansk. Russia is active in boosting the production of sea-borne super-cooled gas as its pipeline gas exports to Europe, once a key source of revenue for Moscow, have plummeted amid the Western sanctions imposed over the conflict in Ukraine. Those resources are now being directed East, where consumer demand is far greater.”
The determination to make the Northern Sea Route viable has only been boosted by Western sanctions. The effort recently hit an important milestone. From Maritime Executive:
In another demonstration of the efforts to expand shipping along Russia’s Northern Sea Route, the Chinese-owned containership Newnew Polar Bear (15,950 dwt) became the first to reach the Russian port in Kaliningrad after a six-week passage. The governor of the Kaliningrad region Anton Alikhanov hailed the achievement on his Telegram account.
The vessel was acquired earlier this year by a new Chinese shipping company, Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co., and ushered in the route sailing from St. Petersburg at the beginning of July. She started the return trip from China in late August, reaching Kaliningrad on Tuesday and spending three days on dock. The ship registered in Hong Kong is 554 feet long with a capacity of 1,600 TEU.
She is part of the effort to expand trade between China and Russia and grow traffic along the Northern Sea Route. President Vladimir Putin has ordered the authorities overseeing the route to boost annual shipments to 80 million metric tons in 2024.
“Transport companies plan to make this logistics product permanent. It turns out cheaper and faster than through the Suez Canal,” writes Alikhanov touting the party line on his Telegram account.
The Newnew’s trip was marred, however, by Baltic European states’ allegations that the ship damaged a Finland-Estonia gas pipeline.
Anonymous EU officials have recently floated the idea of stopping ships in the Baltic to check their insurance papers as part of a desperate attempt to enforce the ill-conceived oil price caps. Under that failed plan oil not sold under the $60-a-barrel limit cannot be covered by western insurance for its sea voyage. Some anonymous EU officials are saying that the reason they must stop ships carrying Russian crude is that non-western insurance policies may not be effective in the event of an oil spill.
Meanwhile, Moscow continues full speed ahead with its development in its Arctic, including mining and oil well operations along its 15,000 miles of coastline. Much of the oil and gas from the Russian arctic used to go to Europe. It’s now headed to China and India. India got its first shipment of Arctic liquefied gas last year, and the country’s energy companies are looking at investing in Russian projects there. LB Vardomsky writes at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics:
The rapid growth of traffic along the NSR is difficult to overstate. It creates an additional impetus for development of the Far Eastern and Northern regions due to deployment of capacities in shipbuilding, port, and airfield infrastructure and overcoming the isolation of northern territories adjacent to it from the economic space of mainstream Russia. In the context of geopolitical struggle, strengthening of the Arctic vector of development means strengthening Russia’s economic and political influence in the world. Therefore, the NSR should be considered in the context of not only growth of the international importance of hydrocarbon reserves in the circumpolar regions and issues of Russia’s security, but also implementation of the concept of the Greater Eurasian Partnership.
The US is trying to play catch up by pouring money into existing bases in Alaska and Greenland and establishing four US military bases on Norwegian soil. Sweden is increasing land forces in its north and expanding military cooperation with Finland and Norway, but Russian economic activity in the Arctic is only expected to increase in coming years, and Moscow considers it an “area of existential importance” where it can use all components in the defense of its interests, including force.
On the icebreaker front, the US fleet consists of two aging ships – the USCG Healy and USCG Polar Star – that have repeatedly suffered mechanical failures, including onboard fires, leaving them unavailable for extended periods of time. Russia currently has at least three dozen icebreakers, while China has increased its count to four, according to High North News. The US Coast Guard icebreaker program is way behind schedule, and the first vessel will not be ready until the middle of 2028, while the second isn’t likely to enter service in the next six years, extending the problem into the 2030s.
Last week the US enlarged its claims in the Arctic beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast into what’s called its extended continental shelf, which would add roughly one million square kilometers and contain many resources like strategic minerals and rare earth elements.
But US claims will be complicated due to Washington’s failure to join the international procedure for delineating claims. According to Arctic Research Professor Abbie Tingstad at the Center for Arctic Study and Policy, US Coast Guard Academy:
Unfortunately, the significance of this step is muted by the implementation and credibility challenges the U.S. will face as a consequence of its continuing failure to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in which the process for arbitrating ECS claims is laid out, among many other areas of important maritime governance.
Azov-Black Sea
Despite Ukrainian threats to hamper Russian trade in the Azov and Black Seas, cargo turnover grew by 17.2 percent.
NATO continues to be frustrated by Turkey’s unwillingness to apply sanctions on Russia and its refusal to allow passage for NATO warships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits into the Black Sea.
The Center for Maritime Strategy sums up NATO’s predicament:
While NATO strains to formulate policy for policing aggression by Russia and lacks any meaningful Naval Order of Battle, Ukraine – with allied support – continues to innovate with ingenuity via development of ad-hoc, uncrewed surface, air, and underwater vehicles (“USV,” “UAV,” and “UUV”) engaged in Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (“ISR”) and so called “suicide” missions. Beyond providing a morale boost for Ukrainians and some short-term tactical gains, it is not a sustainable means for prosecuting a littoral warfare campaign, nor is it a path to victory. Three NATO countries have Black Sea coastlines: Romania, Bulgaria, and Türkiye. However, for any policing activity or future hostilities, greater numbers and types of naval assets are required. Conversely, an “Armada” of large, slow, combatant vessels is no solution either, especially given vulnerability within the cramped confines of the Black Sea and the 300 km (186 mi.) WEZ of Russian surface to surface coastal defenses plus fast-moving radius of air to surface weaponry (see Figure 1). Maritime success surely requires the ability to operate freely inside these zones.
NATO is attempting to enlarge its presence according to anonymous officials in a Bloomberg report that NATO members Bulgaria, Türkiye, and Romania are closing in on an agreement to create a joint mine-clearing force in the Black Sea. Bloomberg goes to pains to describe the potential effort as peaceful and non-NATO:
The proposed plan would be peaceful in nature and focused on reducing the danger that errant mines pose to shipping routes through the Black Sea. It would not be considered a NATO effort. It would, however, be the first joint action of Black Sea allies since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
But western neocons are clearly thinking of using Romania and any mine-sweeping as a NATO Trojan Horse in the Black Sea. The mine-sweeping plan sounds very familiar to a recent piece at War on the Rocks by Aaron Stein, a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and former senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. The report is titled “Side-Stepping Türkiye: Using Minesweepers to Increase Allied Presence in the Black Sea” and here’s the central push:
Minesweeping ships are purely defensive and therefore would not be as risky as providing Black Sea powers with warships for the armed escort civilian ships in the area. This should assuage Ankara and be a point of potential cooperation, rather than yet another point of friction between Türkiye and its NATO allies. Once transferred and in Romania, these ships (and potentially clearance divers) could be used for a series of bilateral exercises between U.S. and European forces deployed in country, in neighboring countries, or flying over the Black Sea.
These bilateral exercises can augment NATO’s minesweeping capabilities and are a way to conduct exercises with NATO members without needing Türkiye’s official sanction. The obvious benefits of bilateral exercises have tangential benefits for NATO more broadly and could help augment NATO’s regional capabilities in the longer term. The data from these ships’ sensors should be fused with the aerial surveillance intelligence NATO and its member states collect during daily flights over the Black Sea. This data could be used to enhance situational awareness about threats to international shipping and be an important mechanism for the allies to share information about Russian Black Sea military operations currently and long into the future.
During recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assistant secretary of state James O’Brien outlined the five pillars of the administration’s plan: more bilateral and multilateral engagement, regional security based upon a stronger NATO presence, economic cooperation, energy security, and “democratic resilience.”
Arnold C. Dupoy at the Atlantic Council picks up the ball and runs with it from there, describing in a Dec. 5 article how all countries of the region (minus Russia) will benefit from Washington’s presence as the “honest broker.” Turkey must be brought onboard somehow, he stresses, and the US must provide more support for the other two Black Sea NATO members (Romania and Bulgaria), as well as Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and even Azerbaijan. Dupoy stresses that all this will require “deep pockets” in order to fund and train regional military establishments, as well as offer support and incentives to US companies to move into the region.
He does not mention that the commander of the Turkish navy reiterated in a recent speech that Türkiye does not want NATO in the Black Sea and that any presence of non-Black Sea countries would increase tensions.
Russia is taking note of US designs, and in October Putin ordered Russian jets armed with hypersonic missiles to patrol neutral areas of the Sea.
The Caspian
Turnover at the Caspian basin seaports, which is a transit point for the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), grew by 36.1 percent.
The INSTC refers to the use of several routes through the region, including:
- The Trans-Caspian running through the Russian ports of Astrakhan, Olya, Makhachkala.
- The Eastern route, which is a direct railroad connection through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and can hook up to the Iranian railroad network.
- The Western route which runs through Astrakhan, Makhachkala, Samur, and on through Azerbaijan.
The INSTC, which formally opened in 2002, is meant to provide a shorter route than the Suez Canal from Russia and central Asian countries to Iran, the Persian Gulf, India, and Pakistan.
For years the project was largely a dud, but Western sanctions on Iran and Russia is leading to renewed focus on the corridor.The INSTC still has issues to overcome. For one, there is US meddling at key points in the Southern Caucasus that appears designed to throw a wrench in these trade connection plans.
There is also the problem of infrastructure in Iran, which is difficult to overcome due to sanctions. As PlutoniumKun commented on a recent piece:
A key problem with using Iran as a connection to India is internal infrastructure. The two railway lines connecting the Caspian to the Arabian Sea are mostly single track and go over very difficult terrain, so I doubt if their capacity could be easily increased. So any heavy goods trade would be dependent on a very long and slow road journey across Iran. Most Iranian interest has been in developing east to west, not north to south road/rail investments.
Moscow and Tehran are working to overcome these issues, but it will take time as Lana Rawandi-Fadai details at Modern Diplomacy:
On May 17, an intergovernmental agreement was signed in Tehran between Russia and Iran on the construction of the 162 km long Resht-Astara railway line, which is scheduled for completion by 2027. As a result of this route being launched, the transit of freights over the western corridor of the North-South ITC can be increased to the level of 30 million tons, whereas the overall cargo traffic of the ITC will have to increase from 15 million tons today to 41-45 million tons by 2030, and reach 100 million tons in the longer term. Russia is going to invest 1.3 billion euros in the construction of this line. Once the above-mentioned section of the railroad is completed, a through railroad corridor will be formed from Russia to the southern ports of Iran, which will open direct access to the Persian Gulf for Russian freights.
The Pacific
With closer ties between Russia and the Pacific region, countries, the cargo turnover of Russia’s Far Eastern seaports increased by 5.7%
In September of 2022 China and Russia launched a shipping route between Quanzhou and Vladivostok. The NSR is considered by the Chinese side as a separate cargo (blue) corridor of the”Belt and Road, called the Ice Silk Road. It is becoming an important structure for Russian–Chinese economic and political cooperation. China hopes to extend the NSR from Vladivostok to various seaports on the east coast and connect its Maritime Silk Road through them, thereby closing the maritime transport ring around Eurasia
Moscow and New Delhi also continue to pursue the Chennai-Vladivostok Eastern Maritime Corridor.
With the West effectively cutting itself off from Russia, it has forced Moscow to focus on developing trade infrastructure in places like the far east. LB Vardomsky at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics notes the many projects underway there to speed up inland connections from Siberia (which has massive energy reserves and nearly every type of strategic minerals) with Eastern ports, as well as land routes to China:
Such corridors connecting with China are currently being formed in Russia’s Far East; these include Primorye-1 and Primorye-2. The first will connect Harbin via Suifenhe and Grodekovo to the ports of Vladivostok, Nakhodka, and Vostochny, through which transportation will go between Heilongjian province and the southern provinces of China, as well as between this province and the Asia-Pacific countries along the shortest route. The Primorye-2 corridor is designed to provide the shortest access to the sea in Jilin province through Hongchun and the port of Zarubino. To increase the formation of these corridors, the customs regime of the Free Port of Vladivostok was extended to all ports of Primorsky krai. It is quite likely that a new corridor will be formed as a result of construction of a railway bridge across the Amur River near the Nizhneleninskoye–Tongjiang border checkpoint, which will shorten the railway route between Khabarovsk, Birobidzhan, and Chinese Harbin; it will also connect the BAM and Chinese railway network in the shortest manner.
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The US continues to engage in a sanctions whack-a-mole game with the growing “shadow fleet” of tankers transporting Russian and Iranian oil. Reuters recently reported that several Greek shipping companies had vowed to stop transporting Russian oil after getting warnings from the US, and this has been treated as a success story. The problem is Greek shipowners are instead just turning around and selling the ships, which only adds to the shadow flotilla. From Foreign Policy:
But now many Greek shipowners have decided that they can profit even more by selling the ships. Sales began soaring in February 2022, and there’s “demand for tankers, for older tankers across the world, particularly in jurisdictions unencumbered by sanctions against Russia,” the trade publication TradeWinds explained. In the 12 months since then, Greek owners have sold some 125 crude and vessel carriers to the tune of $4 billion. In June, Hellenic Shipping News reported that Greek companies had sold 97 tankers so far this year, 25 percent of the world total….
Despite the good news for the sellers, the generous buyers’ identities have mostly not been announced. The buyers now rushing to pay a premium for secondhand tankers are, in fact, decidedly mysterious. Companies based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have bought the most Greek tankers, followed by buyers in China, Turkey, and India. S&P Global Market Intelligence reports that 2022 saw the creation of an astounding 864 maritime companies with an association or link to Russia. My research assistant, Katherine Camberg, has traced more than two dozen formerly Greek-owned vessels to new owners often so obscure that they even lack a mailing address.
While the isolation efforts are an ongoing failure, they continue to produce upheavals in transit and logistics, including reductions in traffic through Russia between the EU and China, an increase in the role of Belarus between the EU and Russia and EU and Central Asian trade, and the increased importance of Turkiye, South Caucasus countries, and Kazakhstan for Russia. The moral of the story from Russia Briefing:
This is indicative that there are enough buyers and sellers globally ready and able to receive and transport goods back to Russia; and are increasing these trade flows even given the current sanctions that the G7 in the main have levied. Global trade, perhaps to the surprise of the West, is not reliant on the West at all. It more than has its own identity, purpose, and an increasingly active trade development space. The lesson to be noted here is that the West is being left behind.
