How Moscow Plans To Bypass Everyone
Building bridges, breaking barriers
The Kremlin is cooking up new ways for regime survival. Military victory in the Ukraine quagmire is ever more elusive. So Russia is in a desperate search for ways around it.
Putin’s solution is commerce. Europe accounted for more than a third of Russian trade before 2022. This position needs to be filled. And what better candidate than the most populous country on earth, India?
Russia is promising to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure between Moscow and Mumbai. These plans are decades old but with so many sanctions now in place, they are moving from pipe dream to possibility at breakneck speed.
Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.
The International North–South Transport Corridor
The International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) is a potential trade route between Moscow and Mumbai, India. It’s a collection of infrastructure — some existent, some planned — that spans 7,000+ kilometers overall (~4,500 miles). It consists of road, rail and water routes, with an emphasis on the railroads.
In the current situation — that is, without a completed INSTC — freight between Mumbai and Moscow has to travel through…
