Ukraine’s Drone Strikes Against Russia Could Accelerate Central Asia’s Rise As An Alternative Transit Hub For Asia-Europe Trade

Another consequence experts suggest, of Kazakhstan diversifying its oil export routes, is that China could seek to take advantage of Kazakhstani and Azerbaijani ports on the Caspian Sea to bypass Russia, thereby further undermining Russia’s influence in Central Asia.

For instance, official statistics for 2023 show that China has surpassed Russia as a trade partner with all five Central Asian states. China has also been making investments in Kazakhstan’s Aktau port, so as to be able to use it more effectively for its trade along the Middle Corridor.

In December 2024, Kazakhstan’s transport ministry announced that Kazakhstan and China have agreed to launch the trial transportation of lithium-ion batteries from China along the TITR.

Overall, China has been investing billions of dollars in the Central Asian region to build rail and road routes, as it seeks to turn the region into a trading hub for its “New Silk Road”, such as the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway, proposed in the 1990s, officially began construction in the previous year on December 27 in Jalalabad, Kyrgyzstan, the actual construction though, is not expected to start till July 2025.

The new route will start in the Chinese city of Kashgar. It will then go through the Torugart checkpoint, the Arpa Valley in the Fergana Range, and pass through the villages of Kosh-Debe and Makmal, finally reaching Jalal-Abad in Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz segment is planned to be 268.4 kilometers long, with the Chinese portion measuring 165 kilometers.

The route will then extend from Jalal-Abad as a road traversing through Turkmenistan, Iran, and Turkey. Subsequently, as anticipated by the nations involved in the project, the cargo will be transported to Europe.

Upon completion, the railway could be expanded in east-west and north-south directions by connecting it with the rail networks of other countries. A possible extension could involve a route connecting Uzbekistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. Furthermore, Uzbekistan’s existing connections with Turkmenistan and Iran could allow the CKU railway to emerge as one of the shortest links between China and Western Europe.

Once the CKU railway becomes operational, China will be able to transport goods to Europe seven to eight days faster than the current land routes allow, while also potentially increase its influence in Central Asia and alter the regional power dynamics in its favor vis-à-vis Russia.

Apparently, there is some concern, or at least there have been some visible instances of such concern among Russians about the emergence of the alternative transit routes in Central Asia bypassing Russia.

In early 2022, Alexey Shilo, the Deputy CEO of Russian Railways and the Head of the Central Freight Forwarding Department, expressed the company’s concerns about the revival of alternative container routes bypassing Russia.

“We are closely monitoring what is happening around us, and we see some revival of various alternative routes bypassing Russia. These are both statements that are made and figures that we officially see. At least in the first two months, almost 3 thousand containers have already been transported along TRACECA. This year, colleagues are clearly counting on a better result than last year. If they build normal logistics there – with such prices, I think it will be a very affordable route. We can get part of the volume bypassing our country,” said Shilo.

That said, it is also important to bear in mind that the Northern Corridor still remains the most viable transit route for exports from Asia, as is evident from the trends in container traffic along the Northern and Middle corridors.

Not So Easy To Sideline Russia Out Of Asia-Europe Trade Streams

While the international sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 did divert some of the container traffic from Northern Corridor to the TITR, much of the decline in traffic via the Northern Corridor in 2022–2023 was actually due to the substantial decrease in ocean shipment tariffs globally, according to a report in May 2024 by the Asian Development Bank’s Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Program.

The report points out that the container shipping costs between Shanghai and Rotterdam fell from a high of US$14,800 per forty-foot container equivalent unit (FEU) in October 2021 to a low of US$1,000 per FEU in October 2023.

However, following the armed attacks on maritime shipping in the Red Sea, the World Container Index experienced a notable rise, reaching US$5,000 per FEU in January 2024, before declining to US$3,200 per FEU by the end of March. This fluctuation led to a doubling of traffic on the Northern Corridor from the level observed in December 2023, thereby underscoring the corridor’s importance as an alternative route for trade between Asia and Europe when shipping prices rise.

The Middle Corridor, on the other hand, handled up to 10,800 TEUs of trans-Eurasian container traffic in 2022, which is a mere 2.6% of the volume on the northern route, and even that fell substantially in the first 7 months of 2023 by 77% of the level in the similar period the year before.

This is because, the Middle Corridor is fraught with various technical and logistical difficulties. Despite being shorter in length than the Northern Corridor, it remains slower and more expensive than the latter, as it involves multimodal transfers to cross the sea and greater number of border crossings.

Above all, the complex nature of transit and trade procedures in countries that the Middle Corridor traverses make the border crossings unpredictable and this coupled with the infrastructure bottlenecks in maritime, rail, and road transport throughout the entire route renders the TITR as a very complicated and unreliable pathway.

Conversely, the Northern Corridor features lot of developed infrastructure and offers a lengthier but an uninterrupted transit.

As a result, despite its longer distance, the Northern Corridor boasts the shortest average transit times of 14 days, while the Middle Corridor’s transit times range from 13 to 21 days, with the possibility of delays extending this timeframe up to 60 days in the worst-case scenarios.

Conclusion

Despite its current drawbacks, in the long run, the Middle Corridor can emerge as a strategically important alternative to the Northern Corridor for trade between Asia and Europe, provided that it receives further investments and reforms.

Moreover, the Middle Corridor by traversing the boundaries of several countries, offers access to new markets with an estimated population of over 80 million along the route, and countries along this route such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan intend to create logistical hubs and free trade zones in their ports in order to drive economic growth in surrounding areas.

Also, the countries along the Middle Corridor would do well to try and extract as much dividends as they can from the regional competition for influence between Russia and China as well as the geopolitical tussle between Europe and Russia, and even the on and off tensions between the US and Russia that have been ongoing since 2014, basically, to attract more and more investments, and trade and commerce toward them.

Otherwise, the Central Asian and Caucasian countries will remain exposed to the risk of facing sporadic deprivation of crucial growth and development fundamentals due to external events that lie beyond their control.

In his next article, the Author shall discuss the efforts being undertaken by countries along the Middle Corridor to develop their infrastructure and improve the standard and conditions of transit routes along the TITR, as well as try and gauge the potential of these efforts to favorably impact the transit related figures of this corridor in the long run.

For now, it is important to understand that repeated Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s critical energy infrastructure that plays a major role in the movement of oil, natural gas or any other cargo in international markets, should worry Moscow.

This is because even if Russia’s circumstances seem to have changed for the better with the recent ascension of Mr. Donald Trump to the US Presidency, incidents like these could accelerate the trend of alternative transit routes emerging throughout Central Asia, which can continue despite the geopolitical twists and turns that have been ongoing since 2014.  

The improvement of Russia’s relations with the US under Trump’s Presidency does not amount to improvement of relations with the West in total, as European countries do not look like they would drop their antagonism toward Russia anytime soon, meaning Europe may look to invest more in the Central Asian transit routes to reduce their dependence on the routes passing through Russia.

Moreover, countries like China, and Turkey will not stop making inroads in Central Asia and Caucasus, so Moscow does not have the luxury to rest comfortably under the assumption that the Northern Corridor’s pre-eminence as a transit route for Asia-Europe trade streams will continue to remain unchallenged.

Tanmay Kadam is a geopolitical observer based in India. He has experience working as a Defense and International Affairs journalist for EurAsian Times. He can be contacted at tanmaykadam700@gmail.com.