MOSCOW, February 18. /TASS/.The Northern Sea Route (NSR) should be included in the international North-South transport corridor to increase the cargo flow, Alexey Fadeev, Doctor of Economics, Deputy Chairman of the Public Council at St. Petersburg's Committee on Arctic Affairs, told TASS.
"It is necessary to integrate the Northern Sea Route into international transport corridors such as North-South," he said. "In that case, using NSR will increase significantly, and cargo traffic will grow."
This integration could build up supply of natural resources, extracted in the Russian Federation's Arctic Zone, to friendly countries, he added.
Another important direction is to create meridional transport corridors to the Northern Sea Route that would serve shipment of mineral resources from the Arctic. "We now have extreme points where the Northern Sea Route operates effectively - Murmansk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but we need to build railway approaches inside the country that will lead to the Northern Sea Route. This way we will increase export of mineral resources, oil and gas that we have," he continued.
The Northern Sea Route is a shipping route and the main sea line in the Russian Arctic sector. It stretches along northern coasts of Russia across the seas of the Arctic Ocean (Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi and Bering seas). The route consolidates European and Far Eastern ports of Russia and navigable river mouths in Siberia into a single transport system. The route’s length is 5,600 km from the Kara Strait to the Providence Bay.
In 2000, governments of Russia, India and Iran inked an agreement on the 7,200-km North-South corridor. Since then, the project has featured 14 members. Russia and Iran expect the North-South corridor will be an alternative to the Suez Canal to cut shipment time. The corridor's western overland line crosses Azerbaijan. The eastern line crosses Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The waterway runs across the Caspian Sea.