Russian plans to build ring road bypassing Caspian Sea

Russia plans to build a highway bypassing the Caspian Sea and Moscow has empowered the state-owned company Avtodor to develop a highway construction project.

According to the company's director, Vyacheslav Petushenko, the final decision on the project has not yet been made, and a feasibility study is still pending.

According to him, the project participants are considering the eastern and western ring roads around the Caspian Sea, including through Kazakhstan in the east and the Russian Republic of Dagestan in the west.

“We are considering either a western or an eastern bypass in a large communication option ... Here we need to understand how freight and rail transport are involved. We have studies of both the western and eastern bypass of the Caspian Sea,” Petushenko said.

The idea to build a continuous highway bypassing the Caspian Sea was announced in January 2023 after the visit of Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin to Turkmenistan.

The decision came amidst the restriction of logistics chains and creation of the North-South International Transport corridor, which will allow delivering part of the cargo not through the Suez Canal, but through Russia and Iran allowing to significantly reduce travel time.

Earlier, Avtodor stated that the Meridian Highway, which was previously planned as a route from Europe to China, was planned to be directed towards the Caspian Sea. The main line can be partially combined with the planned South-Western Expressway Ekaterinburg-Samara-Saratov-Volgograd-Krasnodar, which will have several branches and will eventually go both to the ports of the Azov-Black Sea and the Caspian basins.

The new ring road around the Caspian Sea is supposed to be integrated with another promising project, the South-Western Chord, which, in turn, is considered to connect to the Meridian route. It should provide overland communication with China as part of Beijing's mega-project "One Belt - One Road".

Earlier this year, the Russian prime minister announced that Russia and Turkmenistan were discussing the construction of a highway along the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea. Ashgabat is ready to create a transport corridor with Tajikistan that would connect the two states with access to the Caspian Sea. According to Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedow, the states of Central Asia, which do not have direct access to the World Ocean, need to make the most of the port infrastructure of the eastern Caspian to enter world markets.