As we established in our previous blog post the New Silk Road is our generation’s main way of transporting goods from China to Europe and back. The current situation in Ukraine definitely had a sensible impact on the transportation on the route involving Russia. Luckily there are alternative routes which exclude the problematic areas to safely and reliably deliver the freights to their destinations, such as the Middle Corridor.
On 24 February 2022 Russia announced a so called “special military operation” aiming for the “demilitarisation” and “denazification” of Ukraine. This resulted in the russian army troops setting foot on ukrainian territory which led to a deffensive counter attack from the ukrainian side.
Russia’s idea was a quick operation, but things didn’t go as well as they planned. Almost a year past since the first attack and the end of it right now is not in the foreseeable future.
The EU stated numerous sanctions aiming to weaken the russian econmy, to speed up the process of ending the military activity. Due to the sanctions and the obvious security issues, the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) was presented with a problem to be solved.
The route through Russia was considered as the main route for freight transport between China and Europe, but the current situation makes it more difficult to ship goods on the Northern Corridor. This is where the Middle Corridor comes into play.
“The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), known as the Middle Corridor, is a rail freight and ferry system linking China with Europe. It starts from Southeast Asia and China, and runs through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey before reaching southern or Central Europe, depending on the cargo destination. Geographically, this is the shortest route between Western China and Europe.”[1]
Even though nowadays there are some difficulties with transporting goods from China to Europe through Russia, there are alternative routes avaiable. These routes offer in most cases cheaper, safer and most importantly faster solutions for the problem, exluding russian territory.
Russia states that their military operations don’t interfere with the freight transport through the country. After all for most of the companies the Middle Corridor should be a good alternative option to consider.
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Silver Runner LLC
9400 Sopron, Hungary, Színház utca 14.
27527199-2-08
HU27527199
HUOCCSZ.08-09-033887
08-09-033887