According to Marat Zembatov, Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute of State and Municipal Management, Higher School of Economics; Member, Russian-Omani Business Council, Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation; Expert, BRICS Business Council Group on Transport and Infrastructure; Ph.D. in Economics:
“Kazakhstan has begun to remove one of the bottlenecks in rail transit from China to Europe. Since August 17 the automatic release of rail transit declarations has been extended, including on routes toward Brest. More than 92,100 transit declarations were processed in January–July 2026, of which 13,200 were released automatically in the European direction, 58,300 to Central Asia and 20,600 along the TITR corridor. That is how the administrative and paperwork barriers in the way of commercial cargo come down. But what of the infrastructure framework on which the network’s efficiency depends?
Global trade today is not so much contracting as changing its geography. The WTO’s 2025 report on global value chains notes signs of trade fragmenting along geopolitical lines and of flows being redirected through transit countries, with Central and West Asia already standing out as a new transit hub.
In 2026 this trend has intensified. One of the reasons has been systemic disruption to shipping in the Persian Gulf region. The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the vulnerability of long maritime trade chains and drove transport and energy costs up on a scale not seen since the oil crisis of 1973.
Against this background Kazakhstan acquires particular value as the holder of extensive transit potential—not so much because it offers the world some single new route as because it organically joins together several routes at once, routes capable of backstopping world trade.
As recently as 2000 the Kazakh railway was above all a legacy of Soviet transport geography. The operating length of the network was 13,545 km, of which about 4,700 km was double-tracked and 3,725 km electrified. Some of Kazakhstan’s track ran through the territory of neighboring states, while individual sections inside Kazakhstan itself were managed by neighboring railway administrations. Even then the boundary between the national and the transit function was notional: physically the railway remained part of a larger Eurasian system.
Over a quarter of a century the operating length has grown to roughly 16,000 km. More importantly, Kazakhstan has been consistently removing bottlenecks where international freight flows converge, and continues to do so. In 2025 the country’s railways carried about 320 million tons, of which 177 million tons was domestic traffic, 89.2 million tons exports, 20.7 million tons imports and 33 million tons transit. Transit grew fastest of all—by 19.9% over the year. In the first quarter of 2026 it added a further 14%.
In the east of the country the main project in this overhaul is the 836 km second track on the Dostyk–Moiynty line. It increases capacity on the key Chinese corridor fivefold—from 12 to 60 train pairs a day. At the same time Kazakhstan is building the 303 km Bakhty–Ayagoz line, which is to create a third rail crossing with China, upgrading Altynkol–Zhetygen and developing the Moiynty–Kyzylzhar corridor. As a result, inbound capacity from the Chinese side ceases to depend on a single border hub. And in 2025 rail traffic between Kazakhstan and China had already reached 35.6 million tons.
But it is not enough to receive more Chinese trains. They also have to be sent onward without delay. That is why the development of the Dostyk–Moiynty hub is directly bound up with arrangements between Kazakhstan and Russia. In April 2025 KTZ and Russian Railways approved a new strategic cooperation plan for 2025–2027. In July the two sides agreed to change the operating technology at the interstate interchange points (which Logistics Insights has covered in detail), to automate the handover and acceptance of trains and to increase the exchange of trains by roughly 30%—from 65 to 85 train pairs a day. In November a separate agreement followed on developing nine Russian-Kazakh interstate interchange points through 2030.
These projects look to the future and at the same time answer a set of pressing questions about capacity here and now. Over the past seven years container transit between Russia and China via Kazakhstan has grown from 33,000 to 550,000 TEU—roughly sixteenfold. What we have before us, then, is a single transport task being solved: Kazakhstan is widening the entrance on the Chinese side, and together with Russia it is widening one of the main exits to the north and west. In parallel, last November’s Russian-Kazakh intergovernmental agreement set out cooperation in transit rail traffic and the transshipment of export cargo, including tariff terms and long-term flow planning.
The growing strength of Kazakhstan’s railways matters to far more than its two largest neighbors. The whole of Central Asia is in a particular geographical position: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are all on the UN’s list of landlocked developing countries. The UN notes that such countries are forced to depend on transit states and on average bear substantially higher transport costs when trading with external markets.
In August 2025 the Third UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries was held in Awaza, Turkmenistan. Its official closing press release named high trade costs and infrastructure gaps among the chief problems of this group of countries. And the conference’s transport session carried what was almost a programmatic title: “From landlocked to land-linked”—that is, from a country locked in by land to a country linked by a new overland route. In this context Kazakhstan is of interest to Central Asia as the one mechanism for overcoming the constraints of being landlocked. Because it is through its railway network above all that neighboring states gain additional outlets to Russia, China, the Caspian and on to the world ocean and world markets.
This also makes clear how the maritime part of Kazakhstan’s transport system has evolved. The port of Aktau was once primarily an oil port. In 2010 its throughput reached roughly 12.8 million tons, with about four-fifths of that oil. After a significant part of the oil flows was redirected into pipelines, the port’s throughput fell—but its function changed. Today Aktau and the later-built port of Kuryk are becoming an extension of the railway across the Caspian. Aktau’s capacity is 11.8 million tons a year, and its new container hub is designed for 240,000 TEU a year. Kuryk is planned for 6 million tons, including 4 million tons at the rail terminal.
It is precisely this transit multi-vector character that distinguishes the evolution of Kazakhstan’s transport system. Cargo arriving from China can leave via Russia and Belarus, via the Caspian, Azerbaijan and Georgia, or turn toward Turkmenistan and Iran along the eastern branch of the International North–South Transport Corridor. Central Asian cargo can use the same hubs in the opposite direction. The World Bank estimates that, if infrastructural and organizational bottlenecks are removed, the Middle Corridor could triple its volumes and halve delivery times by 2030. The World Bank itself stresses that the route’s significance lies not only in China–Europe transit but in the development of regional trade.
This key role of Kazakhstan as a transit hub for the whole Eurasian space is especially important in the age of decoupling. The rupture of former trade ties does not destroy the need for shipping. It forces the shipper to invest in a degree of route redundancy—to have a second border crossing, a second port, a second rail axis and the ability to change direction in the event of sanctions, armed conflict, the closure of a strait or an infrastructure failure (though experience has shown that this does not always guarantee against the loss of cargo, it is still better to have a plan B). Kazakhstan is in effect building precisely such a system, with built-in mechanisms for guaranteed multimodality and for diversifying the directions in which cargo moves. And that is why Kazakhstan’s transport role in the world system of trade and freight links is today described more accurately not by the familiar metaphor of a “bridge” but by the function of a “switch.”
And the 2026 figures show that this function is working. In January–July alone the KTZ network carried 184.4 million tons of cargo, 3.2% more than a year earlier. Export cargo grew 6.5% to 53.4 million tons. Coal, grain, ore, petroleum products, containers and transit cargo all move on the railway at once—that is, the network serves the domestic economy, exports and international corridors alike.
In this sense Russia, Kazakhstan and China are not forming some new closed trading bloc but an important backup structure for continental Eurasia, one that serves the common good of the whole continent.
The more world trade fragments into politically and logistically heterogeneous spaces—evidence of which we see today from Spain’s Ceuta to American tariffs on Canadian goods—the more costly the ability to switch cargo safely from one route to another becomes. The present modernization of Kazakhstan’s railways will therefore have far-reaching consequences both within the Eurasian economic space and well beyond it. From a state with no access to the world ocean Kazakhstan is gradually turning into one of those transport hubs on whose stability Eurasian—and more broadly world—trade depends. Whether Eurasia itself can preserve its trade connectivity in an era when routes are being redrawn globally, time will tell. And perhaps it will tell very soon.”
Read next content