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By Vusal GULIYEV, Visiting Research Fellow at the Asian Studies Center of Boğaziçi University
The Russo‑Ukrainian war has affected global container traffic flows more profoundly than any other recent crisis. A series of West‑led sanctions and export restrictions imposed on Moscow has forced logistics companies to avoid shipping consignments via Russia’s Northern Corridor. At the same time, the disruption of operations through the Trans‑Siberian transit line has opened up new avenues for wide‑ranging cooperation along the emerging Trans‑Eurasian transport and trade corridors. The current geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe gives an additional impetus to what countries like Türkiye officially call the Trans‑Caspian East‑West‑Middle Corridor Initiative as well as to a set of containerized rail freight transport networks that traverse Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and Anatolia whilst circumventing Russian territory. This alternative multimodal cross‑regional path—widely known as the Trans‑Caspian International Transport Route (TITR)— could help ease current logistics woes and begin a new chapter in terms of interconnectivity across the Euro‑Asian transportation networks, as global freight flows struggle to pick up speed in the wake of heavy economic sanctions on Kremlin.
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