Eight years after a dry run for the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) was conducted between Mumbai and Astrakhan via Bandar Abbas, the Russian authorities are keen to convert this corridor into a significant logistics artery. The centrepiece of such plans is to make Astrakhan, a city about 100 kilometres north of the Caspian Sea, a gateway for Indian products to Russia and Central Asia.
As the Ukraine war has entered its fifth month, and two decades after Iran, Russia and India signed the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) in 2002, Dariush Jamali, head of the Iranian-Russian Port of Solyanka in Astrakhan Oblast, announced that the first transit shipment from Russia to India had been sent through Iran by way of the INSTC (Mehr News Agency, June 11). This shipment passed on a multimodal route through Astrakhan Port, specifically the Solyanka part (Russia); Bandar Abbas and Chabahar ports (Iran); and Nhava Sheva Port (India).
While G20 foreign ministers were meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, threatened further escalation in his war against Ukraine, announcing to the world that “by and large, we have not started anything in earnest yet”. What he meant became quickly clear when a missile attack hit an apartment building in Chasiv Yar in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, killing 33 people. Further indiscriminate attacks followed against Kharkiv in northern Ukraine and Mykolaiv in the south.
At the recent G7 Leaders’ Summit in Germany, Western leaders formally launched a global infrastructure and investment partnership, largely designed to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Since its launch in 2013, BRI has been marred by criticism of unsustainable infrastructure projects in some recipient countries—from debt traps to environmentally degrading and democracy eroding projects.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held “substantive and constructive” talks on Beijing-Washington relations and major international and regional issues of common interest, on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
“Western universities need to understand that Chinese military scientists have only one client, and that is the People’s Liberation Army.” — Meia Nouwens, researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Politiken, May 19, 2022.
The US military could potentially be at a tactical disadvantage should a conflict arise in the South China Sea over Taiwan. This is what National Defense magazine noted regarding the edge of China in terms of developing energetic materials commonly used in pyrotechnics, propellants, and explosives.
In the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, a great deal of attention has been given to the causes and consequences of the failed intra-Afghan peace process, the factors leading to the collapse of the Afghan military and the role played by pervasive corruption at the highest levels of the country’s internationally backed government.
Not long after the commencement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I wrote that for China, binding itself tightly to Moscow would do harm to Beijing’s long-term interests.
That is because, I wrote, an alliance between a superpower like China and a far less dynamic country like Russia, whose economy is a small fraction of the former’s size, is not much of an alliance. This would especially hold true if Beijing’s support for Russian President Vladimir Putin deepened European wariness of China and caused Europe and the United States to grow even closer, both of which now seem almost certain.
As the war and resulting sanctions redraw trade maps in Asia, Iran stands to be the primary beneficiary.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has set off a series of sanctions from Western states and many others that will have broad implications for some time to come, even in the unlikely scenario of a relatively quick end to the fighting. The impact on the global economy and supply chains from both the war and the escalating sanctions regime has already been significant but will have long-term consequences on the geoeconomics of Asia and East-West trade that require closer examination.