MOSCOW, March 5. /TASS/. The Arctic ship repair program is needed to ensure cargo traffic along the Northern Sea Route (NSR), press service of the Vostokgosplan Federal Autonomous Scientific Institution said.
"We need thorough work to accelerate the Northern Sea Route infrastructures' development," the press service said. "Many decisions have not been in place. <...> To ensure the cargo traffic, an Arctic ship repair program needs to be developed."
The NSR development plan's implementation largely depends on the availability of a modern cargo fleet, Vostokgosplan's Director Mikhail Kuznetsov noted. In his opinion, the Northern Sea Route should not be a local project, so that it could play fully the role of an important international route, where single end-to-end service should be introduced.
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 (the 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.