Putin Driving Russia's First East-West Highway: Developing Siberia, Russia's Far East, & Cooperation With China

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been on an extensive, strategic tour of Siberia and Russia's Far East since Aug. 23, visiting Kamchatka, Yakutia, and, via the new Khabarovsk-Chita highway, the Amur and Trans-Baikal Regions. The focus of his visit is development and the living standards of the region's sparse population — both issues which are critical to creating the economic base to build such great projects as the Bering Strait tunnel.

For the last four days, Putin has been driving a Lada car on a 2,000-km stretch of the brand new Khabarovsk-Chita highway, the first paved road to link the Far East to the rest of the nation. He stopped off to lead a meeting at the construction site of Cosmodrome Vostochny ("East") on Aug. 28, and yesterday launched the Russian section of the Russia-China oil pipeline. On his road trip, Putin has been talking to Russians who live and work in this vast region, as well as high-level government officials. Putin said he undertook the long drive "to see with his own eyes how the people live in the Far East," and to discuss such problems as high food and gasoline prices, the poor quality of housing, and health care, Xinhua reported today.

Before he left Khabarovsk on Aug. 27, Putin said that the "constructed highway is not an ordinary event for Russia. I don't want to use bombastic words, but all the same this is a salient event for Russia and has even historic meaning. Our country, occupying the largest territory in the world, has never been connected from the west to the east with a highway," he said. Over the last century, Russia has built railroads to connect the Far East to the rest of Russia, for strategic and military reasons, inclusively, Itar-Tass cited Putin saying. Russia had urgently built the Trans-Siberian Railway before the war with Japan in 1904, and the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) "above all under conditions of the growing conflict with China as it was then," he said. The new highway, is the first such infrastructure not built for any "outside" reason.

Economic life develops around projects of this kind, Putin said. "We plan to build there several major projects. These are a hydropower station and a future cosmodrome." He now wants to inspect other future points of development.

On Aug. 28, Putin drove his Lada car to the construction site of the Vostochny National Cosmodrome project at Uglegorsk, Amur Region. There, he told a meeting that building the facility will reaffirm Russia's "high status and leading position" in space technology and exploration. On July 19, Putin had announced that his government would allocate almost 25 billion rubles (over $800 million) to begin construction of the cosmodrome in earnest over the next three years.

"Construction of this facility will provide an opportunity not only to reaffirm Russia's technological status and mobilize our intellectual resources and industrial potential," Putin told the meeting. "What is equally important, the project will enable hundreds and perhaps thousands of professionals and, above all young professionals, to express themselves and their talents and realize their most ambitious plans. And, of course, building this spaceport will serve as a good, solid push for the development of the Far Eastern region of the Russian Federation.... Simultaneously with the creation of technological infrastructure, and perhaps at an even faster pace, we will need to address social problems. A new, modern city that is comfortable in all respects must be built."

Yesterday, Putin met Zhang Guobao, head of China's National Energy Administration, in Skovorodino, Amur Region, for the opening ceremony of the China branch of the 4,000-km pipeline to deliver oil from eastern Siberia to Daqing, China. "This project is important for our Chinese friends and for Russia," Putin said as he turned the valve. "For China it means stable supplies and a better energy balance, and for us it means access to new and promising markets in the Asia-Pacific region — in this case, the very promising and rapidly developing market of China." The new pipeline marks an important step to diversify its energy partners, now heavily concentrated in Europe, to the Asia-Pacific Region, he said.

"I want to point out that this project is not just about delivering Russian crude to China; it is really a multi-faceted project that strengthens our energy cooperation. Our Chinese partners are involved in oil production in the Russian Federation, and Russian companies are shareholders in the oil refineries and the distribution network in China." It is now up to the Chinese side to complete the pipeline, so that Russian oil will enter China this year, Putin said.

"Our cooperation with China, of course, is not limited to hydrocarbons. Our military-technical cooperation is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. We are also expanding the supply of machinery and equipment from Russia. Regarding energy, Russia is probably China's main partner in the field of civilian nuclear energy, and here the delivery of Russian equipment is valued in the billions of dollars. By the way, our cooperation with China in this sector [nuclear energy] is multilateral," also involving European partners, including Germany's Siemens, he said. But for Russia, most important is that which helps the eastern regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East to develop.

Today, Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Rosatom Nuclear Energy State Corporation, said that Russia and China will cooperate to build commercial fast breeder reactors, Itar-Tass reported. In July, China had launched an experimental fast breeder reactor built with Russian cooperation, as agreed during Putin's ground-breaking visit to China in October 2009, and the two nations should sign a contract by November to build another two experimental fast breeder reactors, he said.