By Vestnik Kavkaza
A meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia, China and India took place on February 2nd in Beijing, where the head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry Wang Yi proposed to his colleagues discussion of the creation of a new Great Silk Road within the concept “one belt, one road.”
Yevgeny Avdokuhin, the director of the Center for Asian Studies of the M.V. Lomonosov MSU Economic Faculty, tried to puzzle out the details of the project. He admitted that there are no specifics about the project at the moment, which was called in Beijing “the Silk Road Economic Belt."
There is no information about the countries it will run through, or whether it will have any branches. If on Russian territory, then where, how will that road run through Crimea or through Ukraine? There are very many economic and political questions.
However, Yevgeny Avdokuhin noted that despite the opacity of the details at the current stage, the chances of fulfilling the project are high: “We know what the money was granted for, it is very big – $40 billion. A special fund was created for development of the project, and it was all set at a high state level. I think that the project will develop, and not just be declarative.”
The expert doesn’t exclude the opportunity of tying the project into Russian plans for the transformation and modernization of the Trans-Siberian Railway, BAM, and a whole set of regional projects. “A shift to the continental age of development of international relations is taking place. The world is undergoing a renaissance of railways, which somewhat fits the concept of continentality.”
“Some experts talk about curses for Russia: the raw material curse, the resource curse, the financial curse, and the continental curse. There are huge territories from the Urals to the Far East, and the long railway lines here and other roads, they are quite long, reasonably equipped, not state-of-the-art,” Avdokushin concludes, stating that in the new era the geographical situation and vast territories of Russia will stop being a negative factor which prevents development.
