Picture a refrigerated box of Russian beef leaving a cold store near Astrakhan for a buyer in Tehran. Its forwarder can choose among three paths, and none of them is a single train. One puts the box on a small ship in the Volga delta and sails it over the Caspian. Another sends it by rail around the eastern shore, through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The third runs it down the western shore through Azerbaijan until the tracks end at the Iranian border town of Astara, where a truck takes over.
Those three paths, together with the sea lanes that carry on from Iran’s southern coast toward India, make up what governments call the International North-South Transport Corridor, or INSTC. Below we follow freight along each of them, name the harbors involved, read what the trade figures for 2025 and 2026 show and point to the pieces still missing. Every status is given as of late October 2026.
Where does the INSTC actually run?
Diagram: Portolan. Schematic map of the International North-South Transport Corridor showing the western rail route via Azerbaijan with the missing Rasht-Astara link, the trans-Caspian sea route, the eastern rail route via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and the sea legs from Bandar Abbas and Chabahar to Mumbai
Russia, Iran and India set the project up with an agreement in 2000, and states along the way signed on in later years. The pitch has barely changed in a quarter of a century: goods traveling between the Baltic region and the Indian Ocean could cross Russia and Iran instead of sailing around Europe and through the Suez Canal. Russian officials give the full distance from St. Petersburg to Mumbai as roughly 7,200 km.
Drawn on a map, the idea looks like one line. On the ground it breaks into separate links, each with its own operators, border rules and weak point. Table 1 puts them next to each other.
Table 1. Links of the INSTC and where each stood in October 2026
| Link | Passes through | Carried by | Where it stands | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western shore | Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran | train, then truck | running with a road gap of about 162 km between Astara and Rasht | rail line across the gap not yet started |
| Across the Caspian | Russia, Iran | small river-sea ships | running, tonnage up sharply in 2026 | shallow water, small vessels |
| Eastern shore | Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran | train | running since 2014 | three frontiers, gauge change at the Iranian border |
| Indian Ocean leg | Iran, India, Gulf states, East Africa | ship | Bandar Abbas restricted; Chabahar now has a rail link, still in testing | access to Iran’s southern harbors |
Source: statements of Russian and Iranian officials reported by TASS, Interfax and Vedomosti; Lloyd’s List Intelligence for the southern ports. Data as of October 2026.
Why is the 162 km gap at Astara so important?
Diagram: Portolan, based on TASS, Interfax, Vedomosti and Russian government statements, 2026
The western link is the most direct overland line between Moscow and Tehran. Trains head south through Russia to Dagestan, follow the coast across Azerbaijan and stop at Astara. Iranian rails pick up again at Rasht, about 162 km further on. Between the two towns everything travels by road: containers come off the wagons, ride on trucks to Rasht and go back onto wagons there. Each lift costs money and hours and gives the cargo one more chance to be damaged.
Filling that gap is the biggest building job on the whole corridor. Speaking at a Caspian forum in Dagestan in October 2025, Russia’s deputy transport minister Alexei Shilo outlined the planned line, with eight stations, 73 bridges and 30 overpasses, and said land had been registered for the first 77 km, Interfax reported. Energy minister Sergei Tsivilev, who co-chairs the Russian-Iranian intergovernmental commission, put the budget at €1.6 billion in February 2026 and said €1.3 billion of it would come from Russia. By our arithmetic that works out to nearly €10 million per kilometer, with Russia covering about 81% of the bill.
The timetable has slipped more than once. A first agreement on the line goes back to May 2023. Tsivilev had named April 1, 2026 as the day for a document that would launch construction. In April, though, Iran’s ambassador in Moscow Kazem Jalali told the newspaper Vedomosti that the executive contract would be signed toward the end of the year instead, and blamed the war in the region. The latest word came on October 19, 2026, when deputy prime minister Alexei Overchuk said Tehran had informed Moscow that the land along the route was now purchased; Russia, he added, was still waiting for papers proving it, TASS reported.
Did you know? On the planned Rasht-Astara line, bridges and overpasses outnumber stations by almost thirteen to one: 103 structures against eight stations, going by the figures of Russia’s transport ministry.
Is the Caspian Sea route the fastest-growing part of the INSTC?
Ships give the corridor a way to skip third countries. Freight loads at Astrakhan, Olya or Makhachkala on the Russian coast and is landed at Iranian harbors such as Anzali, Astara, Nowshahr and Amirabad. Each of them is profiled in our guide to Caspian Sea ports.
In 2026 this sea link outran everything else. For January to April, the governor of Astrakhan region Igor Babushkin and ambassador Jalali reported 2.2 million tonnes moving over the Caspian section, 68% more than a year before, which implies about 1.3 million tonnes in the same months of 2025. Russian meat sales almost quadrupled and flour and cereals doubled; northbound, Iran shipped more fruit, nuts, cement and rolled steel. Baird Maritime added that Russian grain sent over the sea, most of it to Iran, came to 311,700 tonnes in August 2026, up 13.4% on August 2025.
Nature sets the ceiling. The northern Caspian and the Volga delta are shallow, so the fleet is made up largely of small river-sea vessels and the channels must be dredged again and again. Tehran wants more capacity at the Russian end: in October 2026 Iran’s first vice-president Mohammad Reza Aref asked prime minister Mikhail Mishustin to upgrade Russia’s southern Caspian ports for grain and food, and promised that Iran would keep sending trade through its northern harbors.
When does the eastern rail route make sense?
The eastern link avoids both water and road. A railway joining Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran has been open since 2014, so a train from Russia can roll down the eastern side of the Caspian and enter Iran near Gorgan, then continue to Tehran or to Mashhad. The cost comes in paperwork and hardware: three frontier crossings, plus a switch at the Iranian border from the broad 1,520 mm track of the former Soviet network to the 1,435 mm standard track used in Iran.
For a shipper in Siberia, the Urals or Central Asia, that geography can still come out ahead. Russian Railways chief executive Oleg Belozerov said traffic on the corridor reached about 11,000 containers in 2025, compared with 7,200 a year earlier, a jump of roughly 53% by our count. He did not split the total by route, so how much of it went east is unknown.
Which Iranian port should cargo for India use?
Illustration: Portolan
South of Tehran the corridor becomes a shipping lane again. For years most boxes passed through Shahid Rajaee port at Bandar Abbas, Iran’s main container gateway, with services to Mumbai and the Gulf. Bandar Abbas lies on the inner side of the Strait of Hormuz, and since late February 2026 vessels heading for Iran’s southern harbors have faced tight restrictions. In October, Lloyd’s List Intelligence reported that U.S. Central Command was enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports and had turned back 138 merchant ships. The broader effect on trade is the subject of our article on the Strait of Hormuz.
That has given Chabahar more weight. The port faces the Gulf of Oman beyond the strait, and India runs a terminal there. On September 25, 2026 Iran said it had finished building the 730 km railway from Chabahar to Zahedan. According to India Shipping News, full running was expected three to four months later and capacity was put at about 7.7 million tonnes a year, or roughly 21,000 tonnes a day on our estimate. Zahedan ties into the eastern part of Iran’s rail system, and a further line north through Mashhad to the Turkmen border is still being planned. The Indian end of the route, from Mumbai to Chabahar, has its own article on the INSTC and India.
Is the INSTC cheaper and faster than Suez?
Supporters of the corridor claim that routing through Chabahar makes the trip between India and northern Europe about 40% shorter and about 30% cheaper than going via Suez. Read those numbers as advocacy: they go back to early trial shipments, and we found no published timetable that promises a door-to-door transit time over the whole corridor. Real times hinge on the branch, the queue at each frontier, the number of transfers and, in 2026, on which Iranian port can take ships at all.
A fairer test is the shape of each journey. On the Suez route a single vessel carries the box from the port of loading to the port of discharge. The INSTC passes it along several times: a ship to Iran, a train or truck through Iran, then rail, road or a Caspian vessel into Russia, with customs at every frontier. The corridor gains on kilometers and gives some of that back on handovers. For trade between Russia and Iran, or between Russia and western India, the shorter distance can tip the scales. For China-Europe freight it competes with the sea, rail and Arctic options weighed in our guide to China-Europe shipping routes.
What do Moscow and Tehran say about the corridor’s future?
Both capitals call the corridor a priority and say the conflicts in the region will not stop it. In Tehran in December 2025, Russian deputy prime minister Vitaly Savelyev said Moscow was ready to take the project into an operational phase, and Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, promised to clear executive and institutional obstacles soon, Iran’s IRNA agency reported. In October 2026 Mishustin described the corridor as developing actively, and Russian officials said a Russian contractor was carrying out engineering surveys on the Rasht-Astara route while Iran finished its paperwork, according to the analytical site Russia’s Pivot to Asia.
In the officials’ own account, the war has pushed back the schedule without reversing the decision to build. Jalali tied the contract delay to the war and said he hoped the executive stage could still begin in 2026. The trade numbers fit that picture: Caspian volumes climbed in 2026 even as the southern sea leg was squeezed. By the end of October 2026, no official completion date for the Rasht-Astara line had been announced.
What should shippers and analysts watch next?
Anyone moving goods between Russia and Iran can use the corridor today, by Caspian ship, by the eastern railway or by the western rail-and-truck combination. Until the Astara gap is closed, allow for the transfer at the border, and ask your forwarder which Caspian port and what size of vessel the quote assumes.
On Russia-India trade, the sea leg is the open question for late 2026. With rails now reaching Chabahar from the interior, that port, which lies outside the Strait of Hormuz, may count for more than Bandar Abbas for as long as access to Iran’s southern harbors stays restricted.
Analysts have dated markers to follow: signature of the Rasht-Astara executive contract, the first construction work on the line, full commercial running on the Chabahar-Zahedan railway and the quarterly cargo figures from the Caspian ports.
