The E40 Waterway is a proposed 2,000-kilometer inland shipping route that, if completed, would connect the Baltic with the Black Sea and run through Poland, Belarus and Ukraine (Minskdialogue.by, April 20; see EDM, February 18, April 28). The project stagnated following the completion of its... MORE

Plans for a new Baltic–Black Sea waterway, passing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, have the potential to revolutionize the geopolitics of Europe’s East as well as exacerbate East-West tensions (see EDM, February 18). The European Union has labeled the project “E40,” and the United States... MORE

Following the large coronavirus outbreak in Iran, neighboring countries quickly closed their borders with the Islamic Republic. More than a thousand Turkish trucks carrying goods to Central Asia found themselves stuck at checkpoints due to the closure of the Iran-Turkey and Iran-Turkmenistan borders (Daily Sabah,... MORE

For the last two decades, Moscow has counted on Beijing’s regular use of Russian railways to export Chinese goods to Europe. In turn, China’s reliance on Russian rail was based on the presumption that any substitute overland route via Central Asia would be hampered by... MORE

Russia’s enormous size and central continental location—coupled with the inherent problems associated with Russian road, water and air networks (see EDM, October 6, 2015, September 17, 2019, April 2, 2020)—have meant that the country has traditionally devoted much more attention to its railways than most... MORE

Introduction Although no new deals were struck during People’s Republic of China (PRC) President Xi Jinping’s trip to Myanmar on January 17 and 18, the visit was significant for several reasons. The visit was the first by a PRC president to Myanmar in 19 years,... MORE

In mid-March, the Russian media was celebrating the fact that air service had been restored to a part of rural Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, a federal subject in the Russian Far East, that had not seen any civilian planes for 25 years. Since then, however, many... MORE

In early March 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that Ankara would soon call for bids on the construction of the planned Istanbul Canal, between the Black and Marmora seas (RIA Novosti, March 8). He said he hoped to complete that $25 billion project... MORE

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, discussions of trade routes in the Caucasus have mostly been premised on the conviction that the north-south route and the east-west route, backed by Moscow and the West, respectively, are competitors. Every positive development in one is treated... MORE

Since the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991, a perpetual high priority for the Russian Federation has been to maintain or extend Moscow’s influence over the other former Soviet republics as far as possible, particularly in the military sphere. This... MORE