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Naked Capitalism: Russian Trade Corridors Flourish Under Western Sanctions

TLDR:

• Russian sea exports are up 7.8% despite all the efforts by the West to shut down Russian shipping as much as possible.
• Both Russia and China are taking the Arctic very seriously, as it's both faster than the Suez route and also safer from strait blockades. The US is trying to take it seriously and are putting military bases in their newfound colonial possessions in Finland and Sweden that NATO just conquered militarily, but they kinda need like, ships, and building those ships kinda sucks and is hard, and they'd rather be inflating housing bubbles and creating cryptocurrency farms.
• Black Sea shipping has increased despite Ukrainian... I don't even think "pressure" is the right word, they're more like pinpricks. NATO wants to get into the Black Sea but Turkiye isn't interested in all the headaches and potential incidents that might cause.
• Caspian Sea shipping is up too, as it's right in the middle of a bunch of routes, including the INTSC, which connects St Petersburg to Iran and then India. There are problems to overcome here, both in terms of building infrastructure in very challenging conditions, as well as Western sanctions and meddling in the Caucuses.
• Greece has been selling its tankers to shady companies that are transporting Russian oil as that's what's profitable now, and that the US seems totally unable to accept that it isn't actually needed in the global trade system as some high and mighty arbiter, and that other countries can, in fact, do things perfectly well without their corporations.

Quite an interesting article; it goes over the Baltic + Arctic route; the Black Sea route; the Caspian route; and the Pacific route.

For the Baltic Sea leading into the Arctic, cargo turnover at their Baltic seaports has increased by 2.5%, mainly due to oil exports to China surging fivefold since 2019 to 10.4 million barrels in summer 2023, though most Russian oil going to China still moves via the Suez Canal. As has been discussed before in these megathreads, China and Russia really don't wanna rely on these straits given the potential chaos that could be unleashed there; luckily right now it's by a force friendly to them (Yemen), but in the future it could be a more unfriendly force.

It's worth noting that the Arctic route is about 33% shorter than the Suez route, provided ice and bad weather doesn't slow things down. Russia is building up its fleet of icebreakers - it wants to build more than 50 icebreakers and ice-class vessels, ports, and terminals over the next 13 years. And obviously climate change will do its part to help clear the ice out of the way. Additionally, Russia wants to send its natural gas towards Asia now instead of Europe given that Nord Stream is... experiencing technical difficulties, and they're building facilities up for that.

The imperial core is seeking to expand its foothold in the Arctic via Norway, Finland, and Sweden, as well as Greenland and Alaska, to try and counter all of this. The EU has also floated the idea of stopping Russian ships in the Baltic. The US has a grand total of two old icebreakers which constantly need maintenance, so not exactly a fearsome force. Never fear, though - the US is building new ones, with the first set to be ready in... 2028. Russia has over 30 icebreakers and China is also getting started on construction, with 4 icebreakers so far.

Meanwhile, Black Sea trade is up 17% despite Ukraine's very impressive and epic drone strikes on Crimea. While Turkiye continues to stop NATO from entering the Black Sea, there's not really a ton they can actually do beyond denunciations. They're trying to enlarge their presence by trying to establish a mine-clearing force that would be a trojan horse, letting NATO naval assets into the sea, but everybody can see right through this and nobody is fooled by the language of it being a "peaceful" effort. Turkiye still doesn't appear to want much to do with this and Russia increased its aerial presence over the Black Sea with jets armed with hypersonic missiles, serving the dual purpose of dissuading NATO in the Black Sea and also off the coast of Israel, just in case the US tries to do something funny with all the ships they have concentrated there.

The Caspian Sea is a transit point for the INSTC and trade grew by 36% last year. The INSTC connects St Petersburg all the way down to the Caspian Sea and then into Iran and the Persian Gulf, ending at India's Mumbai. Several other important routes go through the region too which connect various Central Asian countries together. It was kind of dead for a while but the US's pressure on Russia and Iran in the last couple years has greatly renewed interest in it, especially as it also bypasses the Suez Canal. The US has been trying to fuck this up again and has had some success, though sanctions just don't have the same kick that they used to. Instead, the issues appear to be mostly internal - if you've looked at a map of Iran, you can see that going north-south kinda fucking sucks due to the mountain ranges, and west-east is considerably easier. Russia and Iran are working on these problems.

Russia's Pacific ports, with the main one being Vladivostok, has seen renewed interest as they're along the Arctic route. China is boosting trade routes to these ports, and Russia is having more interest in developing their far east due to Western pressure.

Hilariously, after several Greek shipping companies promised to stop shipping Russian oil after getting warned by the US, they're just selling the ships. Greece sold 97 tankers in 2023. Companies in the UAE, China, India, and Turkiye have bought these ships, and nearly a thousand maritime companies have been created with an association with Russia in 2022. The US response behind closed doors, I like to imagine, has been "Hey, what the fuck? You can't do that! That's not how that should work! We created this global system of trading and you inferior motherfuckers can't just do all this shipping and insurance without us! WE HAVE FINANCIAL HEGEMONY!!!"