Moscow’s Plans to Build New Rail Routes in North Falling Through

Moscow’s Plans to Build New Rail Routes in North Falling Through

Executive Summary:

• Moscow’s plans for new rail routes in the Russian North, needed to support the Northern Sea Route, expand trade with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and exploit mineral reserves in a region poorly served by transport infrastructure, have been dashed yet again.
• Budgetary stringencies, the difficulties of construction in a region threatened by melting permafrost, and the fact that most routes will not be useful until they are completed have resulted in a spate of further delays and even the likely cancellation of many.
• Unless that changes, possibly through an influx of PRC funding that would come with strings attached, Moscow will not be able to maintain, let alone expand, its production of many mineral reserves or complete Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much-ballyhooed “turn to the east.”

Moscow has long sought to construct a rail line across the Russian North. It has also planned to construct feeder lines between that route and the Trans-Siberian Railway to the south to address the lack of transportation infrastructure in the country’s northern regions, especially east of the Urals. This would allow the exploitation of the immense deposits of natural resources, of which few locations are currently connected to the rest of the country’s transportation grid and thus to the outside world (Window on Eurasia, April 26, 2025, February 26). That desire has only intensified in the last two decades because the Kremlin wants such lines to provide land-based support for the operations of its Northern Sea Route in the Arctic as well as to expand ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (President of Russia, May 6, 2010; see EDM, March 12, 2024).

The enormous costs of building railways in a region where all construction is threatened by rapidly melting permafrost amid budgetary stringencies have repeatedly prompted the Kremlin to delay and thus effectively cancel such plans (see EDM, March 4, 2025). Moscow continues to try to put the best face on things, but this pattern of cancelling earlier announcements is occurring once again in the case of rail construction east of the Urals, to the despair of Moscow analysts and rail officials (Voyenno-politicheskaya analitika, February 25). If Moscow does not build the lines it has called for, that alone will make it almost impossible for Russia to maintain, let alone expand, the production of many of its mineral reserves not now serviced by the existing transportation networks. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much-ballyhooed “turn to the east” would also be impossible to maintain—unless the PRC were to provide a massive influx of funds for projects now estimated to cost upward of $500 billion, which would inevitably come with strings attached (see EDM, February 19, 2025; Sibirskiy Ekonomist, February 26).

Shortly after Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow started postponing the largest of these new rail projects in the North for at least a decade, which it had announced only a few years or even months earlier (Kommersant, June 19, 2023). As the war continued, it postponed additional plans to open rail connections between the Trans-Siberian and the still-to-be-built Northern Mainline, which were intended to expand PRC trade with Russia and Europe (Kommersant, March 12, 2025; Voyenno-politicheskaya analitika, February 1). Despite these actions, however, Putin gave an upbeat speech at the end of March 2025, as if these delays had not happened or would soon be reversed, to boost trade with the PRC and the development of Russia’s natural resources (President of Russia, May 6, 2010). The Kremlin leader declared that details about these new rail lines would be announced by the end of 2025, but that did not happen. Russian experts now say that they do not see any forward movement on this issue and do not expect any in the next few years or even decades, given the budgetary stringencies that have hit Russia’s existing railways since the start of Putin’s war against Ukraine (Vgudok, September 15, 2025; Voyenno-politicheskaya analitika, February 25).

If these assessments are correct—and the available evidence suggests they are—that will limit growth in PRC trade with and across the Russian Federation. Existing routes are already close to capacity and/or suffer from bottleneck delays. Those are already limiting the chances of a Russia–PRC partnership on anything but on PRC terms if Beijing were to intervene and help fund these proposed rail lines. The consequences of yet another postponement/cancellation of the construction of rail lines in the Russian North, however, will be even more fateful on Moscow’s capacity to develop and exploit its enormous reserves of natural resources. In the Russian North, east of the Urals, many existing population centers and even operational mines and petroleum fields are poorly connected with the outside world. More than half of the population centers in Russia east of the Urals are not connected to the outside world by year-round road or rail at all, and the situation with respect to mines is not much better (Window on Eurasia, April 23, 2024). That has prompted some Russians to call for the development of its riverine network or even to use a fleet of dirigibles to export coal. The very suggestion of this highlights Russia’s transport infrastructure problems rather than serving as a genuine means to solve them (Window on Eurasia, July 13, 2024, August 27, 2025).

Many in both Moscow and the West, nonetheless, remain transfixed by the specter of Siberia’s enormous natural resources. Dmitry Verkhoturov, a Siberian journalist who specializes in economic questions, however, says that such people are engaged in what can most charitably be described as “wishful thinking.” The vast majority of the region’s reserves of natural resources remain underdeveloped, with no transportation network to bring them to market (Sibirskiy Ekonomist, February 26). He says:

If we count the 50-kilometer [31-mile] strips on either side of the railroads where transport infrastructure exists or could be built relatively quickly, and there are approximately 13,000 kilometers [8,078 miles] of railroads in the SFO [Siberian Federal District], then the area containing more or less economically reachable resources amounts to only 1.3 million square kilometers [502,000 square miles], of 29.8 percent of the area of the Siberian Federal District.  

Verkhoturov adds, “The rest of the district’s resources are purely geological and economically inaccessible.” There are no rail lines in most of the rest of Siberia, and there are few roads, except in the winter when the rivers freeze, and trucks can travel on the ice. Because of this, the economics reporter concludes, everyone involved must recognize that “Siberia’s resource wealth exists only in the geological sense, but it is not yet possible to exploit it”—and likely will not for decades unless rail lines are constructed. Instead, all too many, including, it would seem, Putin himself, continue to conflate inaccessible resources with accessible ones. Now that Moscow is putting off the construction of railways in the region yet again, the gulf between the two will only grow and have an ever-increasing effect on the Russian economy’s ability to grow, and even on Moscow’s foreign policy choices.

Other Russian experts agree with Verkhoturov’s analysis and say that a failure to build railways in the North may have even more dire consequences than he suggests (Logirus, December 3, 2025). If they are right, the decisions Moscow is taking to postpone or cancel rail construction in the North may prove far more fateful for Russia and the world, given the importance of access to natural resources, especially rare-earth elements, than many other developments currently attracting more attention.