It is a major theme in the world of Russian rail freight: the Eastern Polygon. It includes the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian line, vital railways for logistics to and from China and the far eastern ports. Russia has been vocal about its big modernisation plans, but has quieted down as its ambitions suddenly seem a long way off.
Trillions of rubles in investments and a multiyear plan were supposed to greatly expand the throughput capacity of the Eastern Polygon railways. The initial aim was to reach 255 million tonnes by 2032 after a couple of stages of development. Increased capacity should help facilitate bigger trade volumes with China and through the Pacific.
Earlier this month, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced that the Eastern Polygon would reach a capacity of 270 million tonnes by 2032. That is a higher target than the initial roadmap for the far east railways, and an outlier when looking at the general mood surrounding the modernisations.
Such big and ambitious announcements used to be relatively commonplace, but reports of additional investments and progress on the modernisation works have essentially disappeared in 2025.
The question of money
The reality on the ground is that those capacity targets have become increasingly unrealistic. That has to do with serious financing problems at Russian Railways (RZD), which has an annual investment programme for railway constructions like these.
Because of the high interest rate, government-imposed borrowing restrictions and sanctions, RZD can hardly attract enough funds to execute the modernisation plans. In 2024, the company planned to spend around 1,300 billion rubles (14.2 billion euros) on infrastructure investments, but the real figure reached only 730 billion rubles (8 billion euros).
In 2025, RZD intended to spend 400 billion rubles on construction work, from a total budget of 890 billion rubles. The construction budget has already been reduced to just over 300 billion rubles (3.3 billion euros), which were used up by the summer.
Delays
The start of some Eastern Polygon projects, initially planned for early 2024, had been postponed to early 2025. However, as a consequence of the financial problems, RZD is having to delay the modernisation roadmap even further. “This is truly a problem, because we were doing the design work, and we were supposed to begin the first work at the beginning of this year. Now it’s being delayed by at least a year. But realistically, we see a delay of probably two years”, said deputy general director of RZD, Andrey Makarov, in June.
Beyond the far east, the INSTC is facing investment cuts of 77% (down to 9 billion rubles, 100 million euros) and the northwest of Russia is seeing a fourfold decrease to 4 billion rubles (44 million euros).
The official modernisation schedule remains as ambitious as it was before. In order to meet the Eastern Polygon deadlines, the Russian state development corporation VEB and various banks chipped in with a trillion rubles last summer. Whether or not that will be enough remains to be seen, but local experts are cautious. They told Russian publication Kommersant that RZD plans to recoup its investment through increased freight traffic. However, volumes have been on the decline, and RZD does not make enough money by transporting its least-favourite but highly available commodity: coal.