MOSCOW (Dispatches) – President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said Russia is developing the ambitious North-South Transport Corridor, which will open up new routes for business cooperation with India, Iran and Pakistan, as well as West Asian countries.
In his one hour and 45 minutes State of the Nation Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin also said that Russia will expand promising international economic connections, as well as build new supply corridors, as the U.S.-led West has imposed crippling sanctions on Moscow.
“We will develop the ports of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, we will particularly focus on the North-South International Corridor,” Putin said, noting that it will open up new routes for business cooperation with India, Iran, Pakistan as well as West Asian countries.
“We will continue developing this corridor,” Putin was quoted as saying by the state-run Tass news agency.
“What areas should the state, regions, and local businesses focus their partnership work on? First, we will expand promising international economic connections and build new supply corridors,” he said in the speech days before the Ukraine war’s first anniversary on Friday.
He said a decision has already been taken to extend the Moscow-Kazan highway to Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen, and in the future — to Irkutsk and Vladivostok, and potentially — to Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, which will particularly expand Russia’s economic ties with the markets of Southeast Asia.
The International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) is a 7,200-km-long multi-mode transport project for moving freight among India, Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Central Asia and Europe.
Putin also delivered a warning to the West over Ukraine by suspending a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing that new strategic systems had been put on combat duty, and threatening to resume nuclear tests.
Nearly a year after a military operation that has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West in six decades, Putin said Russia would achieve its aims and accused the West of trying to destroy it.
“The elites of the West do not hide their purpose. But they also cannot fail to realize that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield,” he told his country’s political and military elite.
Putin said the United States was turning the war into a global conflict, declaring that Russia was suspending
participation in the New START treaty, its last major arms control treaty with Washington.
Signed by then-U.S. president Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, the treaty caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the countries can deploy.
Due to expire in 2026, it allows each country to physically check the other’s nuclear arsenal, although tensions over Ukraine had already brought inspections to a halt.
The Russian leader said that some in Washington were considering breaking a moratorium on nuclear testing.
“... if the United States conducts tests, then we will. No one should have dangerous illusions that global strategic parity can be destroyed,” Putin said.
“A week ago, I signed a decree on putting new ground-based strategic systems on combat duty.”
Putin said Ukraine had sought to strike a facility deep inside Russia where it keeps nuclear bombers, a reference to the Engels air base.
Russia and the United States together hold 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads.
The New START Treaty limited each side to 1,550 warheads on deployed missile launchers and heavy bombers. Both sides met the central limits by 2018.
Putin, who has over the past year repeatedly hinted that Russia could use a nuclear weapon if threatened, was in effect saying that he could dismantle the architecture of nuclear arms control unless the West backs off in Ukraine.
Putin said the conflict had been forced on Russia, particularly by NATO’s eastward expansion since the Cold War.
“The people of Ukraine have become the hostage of the Kyiv regime and its Western overlords, who have effectively occupied this country in the political, military and economic sense,” he said.
Speaking for an hour and 45 minutes below a large two-headed Russian eagle crest, and flanked by eight tricolor Russian flags, Putin vowed that Moscow would achieve its aims in Ukraine and thwart the U.S.-led NATO alliance in the process.
“They intend to transform a local conflict into a phase of global confrontation,” he said. “This is exactly how we understand it all and we will react accordingly, because in this case we are talking about the existence of our country.”
Putin was speaking a day after U.S. President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv in which he promised additional arms deliveries for Ukraine, and ahead of a speech by Biden in Warsaw.
Referring to the conflict in Ukraine, Putin said: “step by step, we will carefully and systematically solve the aims that face us”. He said it was “impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield”.
“The responsibility for fuelling the Ukrainian conflict, for its escalation, for the number of victims... lies completely with Western elites,” Putin said.