Armenia offers India a trade corridor to Russia through the Black Sea

The Economic Times writes that the route proposed by Armenia will run parallel to the North-South transport corridor, and will also be built around Azerbaijan. According to the publication,

Armenia has offered to provide India with a trade corridor across the Black Sea to speed up the flow of goods to RUSSIA and Europe. The proposal was made during the visit of Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan to India, writes The Economic Times (ET).

According to the publication, the new trade route will run parallel to the North-South international transport corridor. it will connect Mumbai to Europe via Iran and Armenia, bypassing Azerbaijan, with which Delhi and Yerevan have "stretched relations."

ET sources noted that Armenia, whose ties with India have "revived in recent years," has been seeking investment for the trade corridor for a long time.

As the newspaper notes, the new corridor will create an additional route bypassing the Suez Canal in order to avoid confrontation between Russia and the West. “As the new Cold War undermines economic and political relations between Russia and the West, any large-scale transit of goods passing through the border of Russia and Europe looks too risky for international logistics and insurance companies,” Beniamin Poghosyan, a political scientist and senior fellow at APRI Armenia, told ET.

According to him, India's need for additional trade routes also remains relevant. He recalled that back in 2016, Iran put forward a project for a new international transport corridor Persian Gulf-Black Sea, which was supposed to connect Iran with Europe and Russia through the South Caucasus. Negotiations were suspended during the covid-19 pandemic , but all potential project participants, including Iran, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, have expressed interest in participating, Poghosyan noted. “The Persian Gulf-Black Sea corridor fits in well with India’s plans, as it is looking for additional routes to reach Europe,” the authors of the article point out.

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The International Transport Corridor (ITC) "North-South" is a project of a multimodal route for the transportation of passengers and cargo, the total length from St. Petersburg to the port of Mumbai is 7.2 thousand km. After the completion of the project, the route will carry out the transit of goods from India, Iran and other countries of the Persian Gulf to Russian territory (through the Caspian Sea) and further to Northern and Western Europe. The estimated capacity of the corridor is 30 million tons of cargo per year.

In December, BLOOMBERG wrote that after the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, Russia and Iran were actively engaged in the construction of a transcontinental trade route. According to the agency, Moscow intends to establish a year-round waterway between the Azov and Caspian Seas by expanding existing shipping channels, while Tehran is expanding its rail network to the Iranian port of Chabahar on the coast of the Gulf of Oman.

The creation of the North-South corridor should help Russia solve the logistical problems caused by the sanctions, Vitaly Savelyev, HEAD of the Ministry of Transport, said in May. The Caspian ports of Astrakhan on the Volga, Olya on the Volga-Caspian Canal and Makhachkala on the Caspian Sea are part of this corridor, which is still in the project stage.