On 9 September, the container ship Dubai Tower berthed at Teesport in northeast England with a hold full of Chinese batteries and energy-storage equipment, 25 days after leaving Ningbo-Zhoushan and sailing over the top of Eurasia. It was not the first Chinese box ship to take the Arctic shortcut, but it was the first to do so as part of a scheduled service, run by Sea Legend Shipping, which has since completed several further sailings. A month later, Nikolai Patrushev, Vladimir Putin’s aide and chairman of Russia’s Maritime Board, arrived in China for six days with shipbuilders, logistics firms and research institutes in his delegation, and Wang Yi told him that China’s Polar Silk Road aligns well with Russia’s effort to develop the Northern Sea Route.
It is tempting to read these moments as the opening chapter of a Sino-Russian Arctic axis, and some commentary has done exactly that. The more useful reading is narrower. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a crisis-contingent hedge for Beijing and a sanctions lifeline for Moscow, and the cooperation built on it is asymmetric in ways that will outlast the current shipping emergency. The meaningful transfer underway along Russia’s Arctic coast is not cargo. It is competence, and with competence, leverage.
A route that thrives on other people’s crises
Start with the numbers, because they tell a less dramatic story than the headlines. Russia moved a record 37.9 million tonnes along the route in 2024, of which barely 3 million was genuine transit cargo. In 2025, total traffic slipped by 2.3 percent to 37 million tonnes; a record 103 transit voyages carried only 3.2 million tonnes between them, under a tenth of the route’s volume. The 2018 presidential target of 80 million tonnes by 2024 was missed by more than half. This year will set a new record, with volumes on course to pass 40 million tonnes and China–Russia cargo alone exceeding 5 million tonnes in the first half. Crude shipped along the full length of the route had reached roughly 20 million barrels by mid-October, half again the 2025 total, yet still only about one percent of Russia’s seaborne oil exports.
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