Ankara seeks to exploit transport disruptions from the Iran, Ukraine wars to push the corridor, but high costs, logistical bottlenecks and South Caucasus politics pose obstacles.
In the transportation disruptions caused by the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine, Turkey sees an opportunity to promote the Middle Corridor — linking China and Central Asia to Europe via the Caspian Sea, South Caucasus and Turkey — but major transport, financial and political hurdles stand in the way of realizing it as an alternative trade route.
The Middle Corridor’s prospects have grown since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine disrupted northern overland trade routes through Russia and Belarus and they stand to further increase with the maritime disruptions caused by the de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran and the United States.
Behind Turkey’s push
The Middle Corridor, formally the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), is a multimodal Chinese-European project running from China through Central Asia, across the Caspian Sea, then via Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to Europe.
Turkey has long aspired to see the Middle Corridor take shape, viewing it as a critical link for regional trade and a potential gateway to Central Asia’s vast energy resources, including Kazakhstan’s 30 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 85 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves as well as Turkmenistan’s 400 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves.
Ankara has framed the corridor as a strategic gateway to the Turkic republics of Central Asia, aligning with its broader efforts to expand its influence across the Turkic world.
The Middle Corridor also sits within the broader geography of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), offering Beijing a trans-Caspian route to European markets that bypasses Russia and Iran. For Turkey, that overlap is useful as Ankara presents the Middle Corridor both as a Turkish-led connectivity strategy and as a route that complements China’s BRI.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who paid a three-day visit to Kazakhstan earlier this week, reaffirmed Ankara’s push for the corridor on Thursday.
“By integrating our railway links, port infrastructure and digital customs systems, we are working to revive the Caspian-transit Middle Corridor,” Erdogan said. “As we bring our countries closer together, our goal remains to make the Eurasian region more competitive in the global economy.”
Institutional work on the mixed rail-road-sea corridor began in 2014, when transport and railway authorities from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan established a coordination committee to develop the TITR. In 2016, companies from the three countries created the International Trans-Caspian Transport Consortium as a single route operator. A year later, transport and logistics companies from the same countries launched a coordinating body for dealing with tariffs, logistics, cargo flows and administrative procedures along the route.
According to the Caspian Policy Center, a Washington-based independent think tank, the Middle Corridor would likely consist of some 2,600 miles of railway lines and an additional 310 miles of Caspian Sea crossings, connecting existing transport infrastructure across Central Asia, the South Caucasus and Turkey.
The route remains a work in progress. Key links, such as the Trans-Kazakhstan railway and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, have been completed, but port capacity, Caspian ferry services, customs harmonization and rail bottlenecks still require major work.
The corridor’s allure
As noted, Russia’s war on Ukraine provided the first major impetus for Turkey to advance the Middle Corridor. Until 2022, the Northern Corridor, through Russia and Belarus, was being used for more than 86% of China-Europe overland transport.
The war forced governments and logistics firms to seek alternative routes through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and Turkey. This year brought the Strait of Hormuz crisis, which became another driving force in Turkey’s push for the Middle Corridor. The blockade of the strait disrupted the flow of traffic through the strategic gateway, which typically handles nearly a fifth of global oil and gas shipments, with around 130 vessels transiting the narrow passage daily.
“The Middle Corridor is no longer an alternative, but a necessary choice,” said Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz in April, pointing to the Ukraine and Iran wars.
According to Pinar Dost, a non-resident fellow with the Turkey Program at the Atlantic Council in Washington, Turkey is “seeking to turn [the Hormuz] disruption into an opportunity by strengthening its role as a key transit hub between East and West through the Middle Corridor.”
Furthermore, Turkish-led promotion of the corridor has been made even more viable by intensified US-led diplomacy to secure a comprehensive Armenia-Azerbaijan peace agreement and advance the so-called Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, or TRIPP, a smaller planned corridor linking Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave through Armenia’s Syunik region. Once operational, that route would strengthen the Middle Corridor by improving east-west connectivity across the South Caucasus.
Dost described TRIPP as a “key component” of the Middle Corridor, noting that it could help address one of the route’s major missing links if Armenia and Azerbaijan were to reach a durable settlement.
Another factor making the Middle Corridor more attractive is the growing uncertainty around the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC, a US- and India-backed project announced at the 2023 G20 summit to link India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel.
IMEC was designed to deepen Gulf-Israel-India-Europe connectivity, but its viability has been tested by regional volatility since the Israel-Hamas war that erupted in October 2023, followed by related disruptions in Red Sea shipping routes, the US-Israeli attack on Iran and subsequent Iranian attacks on Gulf states. The increased instability, in turn, has made the Middle Corridor, which bypasses the Gulf, Iran and Eastern Mediterranean flashpoints, more appealing as a route less exposed to major Middle Eastern conflicts.
Challenges ahead
Turning the Middle Corridor into a reliable alternative will require more than geopolitical momentum.
“This route cannot replace trade through the Strait of Hormuz or fully substitute for commerce passing through that chokepoint,” Dost said. “Rather, it should be seen as a diversification and a complementary corridor.”
The corridor can help reroute some containerized goods and non-energy trade, but it cannot absorb the same scale, speed or type of traffic that normally passes through Hormuz.
Another major challenge is the price tag. Building the additional routes outlined above and across newer members of the project, such as Armenia, will cost tens of billions of dollars.
According to Dost, the European Union’s endorsement of the corridor might be helpful in securing some of the funding needed. The Europeans see the corridor as a strategic connectivity route under its Global Gateway agenda, aimed at strengthening links between Europe, Central Asia, the South Caucasus and Turkey, while diversifying supply chains away from Russia-dependent routes.
Logistical limitations also stand out. The Caspian leg remains one of the corridor’s main bottlenecks because cargo must be transferred from rail to ships and then back to rail, making the route dependent on port capacity, ferry availability, schedules and weather.
Those pressures have worsened as traffic through the proposed routes of the Middle Corridor has increased since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while falling Caspian Sea water levels have complicated navigation and forced Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to invest in dredging around key ports.