MOSCOW, October 23. /TASS/. The capacity of Russian shipyards is enough to build 16 ice-class cargo ships by 2030, while the demand is for at least 70 ships, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister, the president's envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District, Yury Trutnev told the government's strategic session on the Arctic's development.

"With the ice-class cargo fleet's shortage of at least 70 vessels, the capacity of Russian shipyards allows building only 16 vessels by 2030," press service of the Ministry for Development of the Far East and Arctic quoted him as saying.

The loan costs and the high share of Rosatom's resources in financing new icebreakers in calculating the economic model of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) makes tariffs for icebreaking services uncompetitive, he continued pointing to unclear fund sources for the Northern Latitudinal Railway, the railway to the Western Transport and Logistics Hub in the Murmansk Region, as well as to a shortage of financing in construction of satellites, centers for emergency units, and in creation of an environmental monitoring system.

"The interest of a number of countries in NSR, their desire to enjoy smooth transport along the route and to influence the situation on the Russian Federation's Arctic coast are becoming more pronounced," he concluded.

The Northern Sea Route is a shipping route in the Russian Arctic that runs along Russia's northern shores in seas of the Arctic Ocean (the Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi and Bering Seas). It connects the Russian Federation's European and Far Eastern ports as well as the mouths of navigable Siberian rivers into a single transport system. NSR's length from the Kara Gate Strait to the Providence Bay is 5,600 km.