Is Russia really going to build Europe’s largest high-speed rail network?

A bold vision or a Potemkin promise? A look at the scale, the strategy, and the obstacles in the country’s bid to link 60 million people by high-speed rail.

The announcement came on Tuesday with the matter-of-factness of a budget line, but the scale of it was closer to a civilisational wager. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin sat at a rudimentary government meeting and said that President Vladimir Putin had signed off on what will be Europe’s largest ever high-speed rail project: more than 4,500 kilometres of new track, criss-crossing the country from Moscow to St Petersburg, Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Rostov, Krasnodar, Sochi, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. These trains will be built at home and capable of reaching up to 400 kilometres an hour, he added.

It's obviously tempting for Russia's passionate legion of detractors to dismiss such plans as a Potemkin promise, the sort of grandiose scheme floated in Moscow only to sink beneath its own concrete. And that's especially true in today's divisive climate, but look closer and the outlines are sharper than the cynics understand. What's more, construction on the first leg (Moscow to St Petersburg) has already been underway since last year with completion targeted for 2028, so this clearly isn't the stuff of long fingers.

The full scheme imagines four main arteries with the northern line from Moscow to St Petersburg the easiest to visualise, shrinking the journey from an already pretty fast four hours to barely two. The southern route is longer and more ambitious and will run from Moscow down through Ryazan, Lipetsk, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don and into Krasnodar, before the hardest stretch of all... tunnelling to Sochi. Anyone who has sweated through the current circuitous crawl, four and a half hours to cover less than 200 kilometres as the crow flies, knows what a transformation this would be for the region's potential. After all, the Kuban is the closest thing Russia has to a California or Andalusia but (much like its Spanish counterpart) it still remains relatively underdeveloped.

Then there’s the western branch to Minsk in Belarus, passing through Smolensk and Vyazma; a line that, in a very different political climate from today, could potentially plug directly into Western European networks via Warsaw to Berlin. And finally add the proposed eastern leg to Yekaterinburg, passing Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, and a journey that today swallows 26 hours could be cut to around five. When you tie it all together, you'd be linking roughly 60 million people by high-speed transit, which in terms of sheer connectivity would be the most ambitious transport project ever attempted on the European continent.

That said, it would hardly be the first time that Russians dreamed big on the rails. Tsarist-era engineers once carved the Trans-Siberian across 9,289 kilometres over seven time zones, while the Soviets drove the Baikal-Amur Mainline through permafrost and mountains at enormous cost to reach Sovetskaya Gavan on the Sea of Japan. Russians have long measured their modernisation in these terms; in a country this vast, the tracks are understandably as much a symbol as a means of travel.

Many will naturally ask, "but why now?" Well, the easy answer is a desire for prestige, but this alone won't shift earth by the tonne or finance kilometres of track and the deeper explanation here is providing employment given Russia has currently mobilised hundreds of thousands of men on wartime salaries. Quite obviously, in peacetime, many will not be needed in uniform and nor would it make sense to keep paying them to stand idle so a labour-intensive project like high-speed rail provides an obvious soft-landing pad... absorbing veterans, keeping unemployment down, and maintaining relatively high salaries while keeping them useful.

There's also the question of stimulus, given that a scheme of this size would help to stave off recession by adding a few percentage points to GDP growth annually and in a best-case scenario, if sanctions ease, it could even drive a late Putin-era boom, so the political logic is as plain as the economic.

Furthermore, on the face of it, it appears Moscow can readily afford it, bar some unexpected 'Black Swan' event and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reminded us only last week that Russia’s national debt is around 15% of nominal GDP. Even if he borrows another $200 billion it would still sit under 25%; a figure that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in Western Europe, where governments gorge themselves on credit merely to keep welfare payments moving. Almost everything, too, will be built domestically, making the largesse an internal multiplier rather than a drain and where Russia lacks technical know-how, China can supply it given Beijing has already laid down some 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail.

In reality, the ghosts that haunt projects like this are related to corruption rather than engineering and the spectre of the Sochi Olympics, with billions skimmed and the Western press laughing at the excess, hangs overhead. Yet many of the leading culprits of that debacle were jailed, a clear signal that theft on such a level won't be shrugged off in future; and in fairness the city itself has been transformed with its population doubling in fifteen years. The Crimea Bridge (the longest in Europe, whatever your thoughts on the politics of it) was built quickly and serves as another reminder that Russia can, when pressed, deliver complex infrastructure feats.

The open question, of course, is whether the new rail scheme will follow the same discipline, and only time will tell. Realistically, the obstacles are formidable and temper any certainty: sanctions will complicate financing, the tunneling in the southern mountains will be technically punishing and total costs could run far beyond official estimates.

What makes the plan more striking is the vacuum elsewhere. Western Europe once thought in terms of 'grands projets,' linking peoples and economies with real vision but now it thinks in terms of expensive subsidies and empty slogans. Spain, for example, boasts a large and impressive high-speed network, but it's fragmentary and underused while France long ago rowed back on its TGV ambitions and Germany's infrastructure is falling apart, with visitors to last year's European Football Championships left stunned at the decrepitude.

Moscow, by contrast, is sketching a line that could, if there's sufficient Eurasian rapprochement, one day run all the way from London to Hong Kong. Today that sounds fantastical, but link Berlin to Warsaw, Warsaw to Minsk, Minsk to Moscow, Moscow to Yekaterinburg, and from there into Kazakhstan or Mongolia and down into China and the map begins to look possible. Politics would have to change beyond recognition, of course, but the geometry is already getting there.

So, is Russia really about to build Europe’s largest high-speed rail network? The sceptics will say no, while the realists will say: the first part of it for sure, and let's see how the rest goes. The political need to absorb demobilised soldiers, the economic need for stimulus, and the strategic need to tie together a vast country... well, all these factors suggest it may well happen.

This is about more than a railway, it's a bet on whether Russia can still dream big in an era when its Western European rivals no longer even dare to dream.