Russia and China on the Northern Sea Route: Where Things Stand
Source: iStock.com/MicroStockHub
On October 20, the European Union adopted its new Arctic strategy, and Russia and China sit at its center. The document names Moscow’s military buildup and Beijing’s strategic ambitions among the fundamental challenges to European security, and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the Union intends to push back against both and seek unrestricted access to the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
The next day, the two governments met in St. Petersburg. On October 21, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Chinese Premier Li Qiang opened the 31st regular meeting of the heads of government of Russia and China at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. Both had just returned from the Council of Heads of Government of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Dushanbe. It was Li’s first visit to St. Petersburg, and Mishustin gave him a short tour of the city.
The Russian delegation was a large one: deputy prime ministers Tatyana Golikova, Alexander Novak, and Dmitry Chernyshenko; Alexei Chekunkov, minister for the development of the Far East and the Arctic; energy minister Sergei Tsivilev; Rosatom head Alexei Likhachev; Russian Railways head Oleg Belozerov; and a number of other ministers and agency heads. The previous meeting took place in early November 2025 in Hangzhou and Beijing.
In talks in a narrow format, Mishustin put the Arctic route on the transport agenda alongside the land border:
“In transport, we are working on increasing bilateral transit cargo shipments and raising the capacity of our crossings on the Russian-Chinese border, and we are expanding the use of the Northern Sea Route as a new transport route of global importance.”
He listed oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy as the strategic core of the relationship and singled out agriculture and food security. As TKS.ru noted, the statement named no volume targets, specific border crossings, or deadlines; it set out directions. What follows is a recap of where those directions stand.
The Volumes
According to Rosatom, the NSR’s infrastructure operator, more than 35 million tons of cargo moved along the route between January and mid-October 2026, 20 percent more than over the same period last year, Likhachev told Interfax. That puts the year on course for the record 40 million tons Rosatom has forecast.
Viewed over a longer stretch, the picture is mixed. Traffic has grown roughly tenfold since 2014, but it has fallen well short of the targets Moscow set for it. A 2018 presidential decree called for 80 million tons by 2024; the actual figure was less than half that. The numbers below come from a review by the Institute for World Market Studies (IIMR), published on October 20.
| Year | Cargo, million tons | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 3.98 | |
| 2023 | 36.25 | Plan: 46.8 |
| 2024 | 37.89 | Decree target: 80 |
| 2025 | 37.02 | |
| 2026 | 40 | Rosatom forecast; 35+ by mid-October |
| 2035 | 110–150 | Rosatom forecast |
| 2040 | up to 200 | Rosatom potential |
For scale, 200 million tons would be more than 40 percent of the 460–470 million tons that passed through the Suez Canal annually in 2024–2025.
What moves along the route matters as much as how much. In 2023–2024, oil, petroleum products, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and coal accounted for 76–84 percent of all cargo, depending on the estimate, and international transit for only about 10 percent. Most of the growth Moscow expects comes from new energy projects, above all Vostok Oil, whose terminal in Sever Bay on the Taymyr Peninsula is designed to ship up to 115 million tons of oil a year. As TKS.ru cautions, aggregate tonnage does not distinguish transit from domestic and export flows, so the growth cannot simply be read as Asia–Europe trade shifting to the Arctic. Shipments between Russian and Chinese ports make up about 15 percent of NSR traffic, according to TKS.ru.
The IIMR’s conclusion is blunt: for now, the NSR is developing mainly as a route for exporting raw materials and for moving goods between European Russia and the Far East.
The Russian Framework
Moscow has widened its ambitions beyond the NSR itself. In March 2025, at the Arctic: Territory of Dialogue forum in Murmansk, Vladimir Putin said the route “should become a key section of the Transarctic Transport Corridor, which will run from St. Petersburg through Murmansk to Vladivostok.” At the same forum, he acknowledged that Russia lacks the shipbuilding capacity for the cargo and rescue fleet the Arctic requires, and that there is still no detailed model of how the route’s infrastructure and fleet should develop.
That model has still not been approved as of October 2026; officials expect it by the end of the year. In early October, Yuri Trutnev, deputy prime minister and presidential envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District, said at a meeting of the Maritime Board’s council on Arctic interests and maritime transport routes that Putin had ordered the Arctic strategic documents updated, starting with the Strategy for the Development of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation until 2035, with an outlook to 2050.
Joint Plans
The bilateral track runs through a dedicated body. In October 2025, the subcommission on NSR cooperation, part of the Russian-Chinese commission that prepares the regular meetings of heads of government, held its second session in Harbin. Likhachev and Chinese transport minister Liu Wei approved an action plan aimed at “forming a sustainable transport corridor,” part of a broader turn toward transport and logistics in the relationship that we traced at the time. Rosatom said cooperation “involves introducing modern logistical and technological solutions to improve the efficiency of shipping and to develop capital projects.”
For China, the NSR is part of the “Polar Silk Road,” enshrined in its 2018 Arctic policy white paper alongside Beijing’s claim to be a “near-Arctic state.” Chinese companies hold stakes in Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2, and since 2019 China has built the research icebreakers Xuelong 2 and Jidi and the ice-class deep-sea research vessel Tansuo 3, though its polar fleet still cannot navigate heavy ice year-round. Cooperation has also extended to security: in April 2023, the FSB Border Service and the China Coast Guard signed a memorandum on maritime law enforcement, and in October 2024 the two countries held their first joint patrol in the Arctic. By 2026, the IIMR writes, China had effectively become Russia’s main partner in the region.
Projects
Container Lines
In August 2026, the Chinese carrier Sealegend Shipping launched the first regular weekly service from China to Europe via the NSR, running from Ningbo to Felixstowe during the navigation season under the “Ice Silk Road” brand. Rosatom granted the passage permit on August 7, and departures began on August 12. Separately, Rosatom and NewNew Shipping have set up a joint venture to build ice-class container ships.
LNG to China
Novatek sends LNG cargoes to China via the eastern sector of the NSR, which is open from June to December. The Arctic route to China takes about 20 days, against roughly 45 via Suez and the Strait of Malacca. The first cargo of the 2025 season left on June 20. The Middle East crisis this year has made the Arctic route more attractive still, as disruption in the Strait of Hormuz shook Asian gas markets.
Mohe–Naiba
The most ambitious land-and-river link is the multimodal corridor from Mohe in China through Dzhalinda, Nizhny Bestyakh, and the Lena River to the port of Naiba near Tiksi, giving access to the Transarctic corridor. The project, estimated at more than 1.13 trillion rubles, was postponed repeatedly before work began this fall, after agreements were signed at the Eastern Economic Forum. In September, construction of the Naiba deep-water cargo terminal was launched at Tiksi. Aisen Nikolaev, head of Yakutia, expects the first tens of thousands of tons to move along the route by 2028.
Irtysh–Ob
Another proposal, reported by the South China Morning Post in August 2026, would connect China to the NSR via the Irtysh and Ob rivers. Like Mohe–Naiba, it remains far from completion, and the IIMR notes that both projects carry a risk for Moscow: greater Chinese influence over the development of Russian regions.
The Limits
The IIMR lists the risks to the NSR and the Transarctic corridor: sanctions and trade restrictions; joint projects stalling over cost or disagreements about the route’s future; the United States and Canada expanding their icebreaker fleets and developing the Northwest Passage; and growth that remains tied to raw material exports without modernizing coastal infrastructure or improving life for local residents. Further out, it adds, Moscow may have to manage disagreements with Beijing itself over the route’s status and use.
The European strategy treats the partnership as a challenge to be contained. In St. Petersburg, the two governments described it as a route of global importance. The volumes are growing, but they are still mostly Russian oil, gas, and coal.
Source:
- Interfax (in Russian)
- TKS.ru (in Russian)
- TKS.ru (in Russian)
- TKS.ru (in Russian)
- Kommersant (in Russian)
- Ulus Media (in Russian)
- Institute for World Market Studies (in Russian)