MOSCOW, January 20. /TASS/. Freight traffic along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the eastward direction increased by 69% in 2024, transit along the route grew by 44%, Alexey Chekunkov, Minister for the Development of the Russian Far East, reported.
"For those involved, the Northern Sea Route has two very different dimensions - the western route, a comfortable one, roughly speaking, and the eastern one - in the ice. <…>. Freight traffic along this difficult part of the NSR increased by 69% in 2024, while transit grew by 44%. We are conquering the ice," he wrote on his Telegram channel.
According to Vladimir Panov, special representative of the Rosatom state nuclear corporation for the development of the Arctic region, the freight traffic along the NSR in 2024 amounted to 37.9 million tons, exceeding the previous record result by more than 1.6 million tons. In 2024, a record number of transit voyages was (92). A record was set for transit cargo - more than 3 million tons, which is almost one and a half times more than in 2023.
Earlier, Panov reported that the freight traffic along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) by the end of the year will amount to 37.6 million tons of cargo, which will be a record.
Northern Sea Route
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. More than 50 ports are on the route. NSR is almost twice shorter than other sea routes from Europe to the Far East.
In 1991, the Northern Sea Route was opened to international shipping. In 2013, a federal law fixed the NSR borders. In 2018, the Rosatom State Corporation received the authority to develop the Northern Sea Route.