The first river electric wheeled vessel, the Minin, has been launched in Russia. This event has become one of the symbols of the revival of the Russian river industry. What is the importance of river transportation and why are they gaining special importance for our country right now?
River transport is one of the most affected sectors of the economy after the collapse of the USSR. In the early post-Soviet period, it was believed that the new market economy did not need cheap transportation by inland waterways. Many industries were shut down, and technological chains were cut off. An increase in fuel prices was added to this.
There is no point in explaining what effect this had on the size of the Russian territory. In 1988, the river fleet in the RSFSR transported 582 million tons of cargo and about 100 million passengers. Ten years later, in 1998, freight traffic totaled 94.1 million tons, and passenger traffic decreased to 11 million passengers in 2019.
In the 1990s, there were justifications for "why Russia is not America" (the title of a book that became popular in the early 2000s). It was argued that in a country with vast expanses and a harsh climate, industrial production does not need to be developed – costs will always be higher than in the city of New York, which lies at the latitude of Odessa, and even more so in those located much further south than Texas or California. And without production, cheap river transport is not needed.
In such conditions, the Russian river fleet – both passenger and cargo – existed on a residual basis, exploiting the Soviet legacy. Ship owners have minimized repair costs. The maintenance of waterways and coastal infrastructure was hampered by a catastrophic lack of funding. Subsidence of depths progressed on the riverbeds (when the fairway was covered with sand and soil, as a result of which the depths decreased and vessels could overcome such areas only with incomplete loading). And this had a serious impact on the economy of freight transportation.
The understanding of the importance of developing inland waterway transport (as a cheaper alternative to rail and road transportation) began to return from the mid-noughties. In 2008, Russia approved the Transport Strategy 2030, which set long-term guidelines: eliminating capacity constraints, balancing modes of transport, and improving efficiency and safety, including on inland waterways.
The Federal Target Program "Development of the Russian Transport System until 2020", adopted in 2010, created a separate subprogram dedicated to the modernization of inland waterways. It was about restoring the guaranteed dimensions of the ship's passages, upgrading locks and navigation equipment, introducing a River Information System/electronic navigation, as well as addressing the bottlenecks of the Unified Deep-Sea System (UGS) of the European part of the country. The goal was to switch part of the cargo from "land" (road and rail transport) to rivers, increase the capacity of the Unified Deep-sea System, and upgrade the technical fleet (tugs, dredgers, pilotage and rescue boats, as well as vessels for servicing the port infrastructure).
Today, the country has 100,000 km of inland waterways, while the state maintains guaranteed dimensions for the passage of vessels for 48.7 thousand km.
The "Strategy for the Development of Inland Waterway Transport until 2030," adopted in 2016, provides, among other things, for the elimination of limiting sections (the Nizhny Novgorod section of the Volga near Gorodets, the Kochetovsky Hydroelectric Complex-Aksai on Don, the Nizhne–Svirsky Gateway), the construction of the Bagaevsky hydroelectric complex, and bringing the guaranteed depth of the EGR highways to 4.0 m.
In the "Tourism Strategy 2035" (2019), the issue of encouraging water cruise tourism was raised for the first time, and concrete results soon appeared. The first PV300 "Mustai Kerim" cruise liner in post-Soviet Russia has been built and is already in active operation in Nizhny Novgorod. Another liner of a similar class, the Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is being completed.
It is expected that new cruise ships of the A45-90 project will begin operating along the Yenisei in 2026.2 "Viktor Astafyev" and "Andrey Dubensky" are the first in the country designed specifically for work in the Arctic zone. In 2026, another brand new cruise ship, the Nikolay Zharkov, a project 00840 liner, will embark on its first navigation in Karelia.
In the coming years, it is planned to supply up to 260 ships (including 73 passenger ships) to shipping companies, mainly due to the fact that the relevant federal program provides for preferential leasing for the purchase of passenger ships. As for the current year, 11.1 million passengers were transported along river routes in nine months (an increase of 20.5% over the year).
In recent years, high-speed waterways using the Valdai-45P and Meteor-120P hydrofoils have been actively developing. The River Highways project has been launched, and subsidizing routes is being introduced to revive high–speed lines on the Volga. Similar measures have been taken for a number of routes on Siberian rivers.
But in addition to the Meteors that existed back in Soviet times, passenger ships of a completely new type began to appear – electric. The electric city fleet (Ecobus and Moscow 2.0) is developing in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Passenger traffic is growing on the Amur at the Blagoveshchensk – Heihe ferry (since May 7, 2025, four flights have been operated in each direction, and since October 27, the line has been switched to hovercraft for the winter). On November 11, Russia's first electric wheeled vessel, the Minin, was launched, and the next in the series, the Pozharsky, was immediately laid. These are a kind of electric river buses designed for regular flights along the Volga River – between Nizhny Novgorod and its satellite city of Bor.
The situation is more complicated with freight transportation. The beginning of the CBO and the announcement by Europe of anti-Russian sanctions (including a ban on Russian ships entering European ports) have seriously affected some areas of river transportation within Russia. First of all, this affected the Volga-Baltic and the White Sea-Baltic routes. During navigation in 2023, cargo shipments along the Volga-Baltic Waterway dropped from 16.7 million tons in 2021 to 12.46 million tons in 2024. The main drop was accounted for by metal, timber and building materials, which were previously delivered to European countries by river-sea bulk carriers.
But again, due to the current geopolitical realities, one of the main trends has been a change of emphasis in the development of inland waterways on the rivers of Siberia and the Far East. First of all, in connection with the plans for accelerated development of the Northern Sea Route, increased attention is being paid to connecting river routes with transportation along the NSR. The northern rivers become "supply lines" to the NSR. In summer in river ports (Krasnoyarsk, Osetrovo/Ust-Kut, Arkhangelsk, Naryan-Mar, etc.) transshipment of goods arriving by rail to river-sea vessels and further along the NSR is underway. There is also a reverse process of transshipment of goods arriving via the NSR to river vessels and ensuring stable northern delivery.
The existing restrictions – shallow water rifts, short navigation, storms on the roads, the shortage of modern dredgers and winter facilities in the Arctic port points (Tiksi, Naryan-Mar, etc.) – are overcome by dredging fairways, using icebreakers, modernization of berths and transshipment bases. New river dredgers (93.159 series), specially designed for use in shallow northern rivers, are being built for dredging operations on the northern rivers. Thus, in navigation, the Yenisei becomes a meridional route connecting the latitudinal railway route along the Trans-Siberian Railway and the latitudinal waterway route along the Northern Sea Route.
The fleet of the Lena United River Shipping Company is being modernized on another great Siberian river, Lena. Lena is turning into an important meridian highway connecting two latitudinal routes: the Northern Sea Route and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. The latter is connected by a railway line starting from Yakutsk and ending at BAM at Bestuzhevo station (one stage from Tynda station).
In Eastern Siberia and the Far East, freight traffic on the Amur River is growing in parallel with the growth of the capacity of the eastern polygon of the railway network, largely due to the development of multimodal infrastructure. In 2024, cargo turnover reached 2.3 million tons, and the preliminary results of 2025 show an increase in cargo transportation volumes to 3.5 million tons. The plans are to increase multimodal transportation to 7 million tons by 2040.
Despite the decrease in the prospects for transportation through the Volga-Baltic water system (due to EU sanctions), the urgency of developing a Unified deep-water system formed around the Volga has only increased. In the north, this system passes through the Northern Dvina to Arkhangelsk, which is developing as a multimodal hub connecting the Northern Sea Route with a Unified deep-sea System and the railway network of the European part of Russia.
In the middle part of the YGS in the Gorodets area, plans to build a low-pressure dam near Nizhny Novgorod were abandoned, and to eliminate the bottleneck (an area with insufficient depths), it is planned to build another lock in the Gorodetsky hydroelectric complex and carry out complex work to deepen the riverbed. In the south, through the system of locks of the Volga-Don Canal, cargo traffic flows to the Azov and Black Seas are provided. In 2023-2024, major works were completed at locks No. 13 and No. 6 (replacement of gates, assemblies, pumps). This made it possible to increase cargo traffic in 2024 by 29% compared to 2023 (up to 13.5 million tons). The construction of the Bagaevsky hydroelectric complex on the Don is designed to ensure a guaranteed depth of 4.0 meters throughout navigation, which will also lead to an increase in capacity for river cargo transportation along the Don.
At the southern end of the EGC in the lower reaches of the Volga, the main tasks for the growth of cargo traffic are to maintain a depth of 4.5 m at the entrance from the Caspian Sea, for which regular dredging is carried out. They are designed to ensure stable navigation of river-sea vessels to Astrakhan through a shallow delta in conditions of subsidence of the Caspian Sea level.
All this should ensure the growth of cargo turnover along the water component of the international multimodal North–South transport corridor from the Baltic and the White Sea through the Caspian Sea and further south along Iran's railway and road network to its ports on the Indian Ocean.
In the context of increasing geopolitical tensions and the collapse of some international economic ties, the problem of internal transport connectivity in Eurasia is on the rise. We are talking about all types of transport – railway, automobile, and pipeline. And water transport, capable of transporting large volumes of goods at minimal cost, is an important part of this inland transport network. For Russia, a separate advantage lies in the fact that river transport routes run not only through the most economically developed regions, but also connect economically developed clusters in the vast sparsely populated areas of Siberia.
Dmitry Skvortsov
