DEAR READER,

With the holiday season approaching, we’ll be sending our final brief of the year next Monday, December 22. We’ll say our official goodbyes to 2025, and then take a short break and be back in January!

Of course, this week also brings our Brief Eastern Europe rewind. Looking back at 2025, it turns out we (and, more importantly, our authors) have written over 70,000 words! Pretty impressive for a bite-sized newsletter. On top of that, our content has earned more than 187,000 impressions. A huge thank you to all our loyal readers for sticking with us. And speaking of reading, this year’s most popular edition focused on Russia-NATO issues, you can revisit it here.

On the topic of security… and the economy, we’re also taking a closer look at the Middle Corridor and its role in the South Caucasus. More specifically: can economic cooperation actually foster peace in such a volatile region? Yours truly dives into this question in this week’s edition.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), or the Middle Corridor has been trending for a while now. It is a route that runs from China through Central Asia, across the Caspian Sea, and onward via the South Caucasus to Europe. The corridor has gained outsized attention since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine scrambled Eurasia’s logistics map, and the necessity of diversifying trade routes has become more apparent.

At its core, the Middle Corridor is a multimodal transport network linking rail, ports, and maritime crossings across Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and beyond. Its main strategic value lies in options it provides, rather than speed or cost competitiveness. In an era when overreliance on specific transit routes has become politically toxic, the Middle Corridor offers a geopolitical hedge for both governments and shippers.

Why it matters for the South Caucasus?

The corridor is significant in this region as trade resilience now rivals trade efficiency as a strategic priority. Granted, the Middle Corridor has been slower and costlier than the Northern Route via Russia (averaging 18-23 days versus roughly 19 days), it still provides route diversification, which became indispensable after 2022. According to the World Bank, container volumes surged by 33 per cent in 2022 as shippers fled Russian routes, even if congestion later exposed serious operational bottlenecks.

Also, it is argued that beyond the China-Europe transit, the corridor’s real payoff is regional. The Middle Corridor enables states such as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to recalibrate economic dependence and access global markets more autonomously.

This argument has been used in the Central Asian case too, that the multimodal routes contribute to turning Central Asia into interconnected crossroads instead of landlocked countries. Such a shift further enables industrial spillovers and logistics services that diversifies economies.

Shared infrastructure also raises the cost of conflict. Corridor states become structurally interdependent. Our author, Nino Lezhava wrote about this in a recently published article, that even politically fraught regions like the South Caucasus are witnessing tentative confidence-building, with Armenia and Azerbaijan publicly endorsing shared transit initiatives (which was unthinkable just a year ago).

Still, enthusiasm should be countered with realism. Georgia occupies a pivotal position in the South Caucasus, serving as the most efficient conduit for the Middle Corridor from China to Europe. Both the EU and China have invested heavily in these routes (though Georgia is currently pivoting away from EU priorities). Plus, the Middle Corridor is still hamstrung by challenges such as fragmented governance, infrastructure gaps, and inconsistent customs. There are high investment costs, especially due to the infrastructure, and this doesn’t help with competitiveness. Georgia also holds a strategic wildcard: the Anaklia Deep Sea Port. Its location could boost the corridor’s capacity and cut transit times, but the political developments (the Chinese-Singaporean ownership, including a Chinese firm blacklisted by the US) have hindered the project, and that has introduced further geopolitical risks.

Then there is the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Although the project promises to boost regional economic development, experts argue that Georgia may be the only country in the region to lose. This could lessen demand for Georgian ports, railways, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars line (which still runs in “test” mode). However, current developments around TRIPP suggest no immediate threat for the next five years, provided Georgia focuses on developing sustainable, secure, and efficient transport infrastructure.

What’s the bottom line? The Middle Corridor will not dethrone maritime shipping or fully replace other transit routes. That’s the wrong benchmark. Its value lies in regional development and potential political stabilization, offering some certainty in the region. How countries leverage their positions along the route remains a separate question, but the project is definitely worth watching in the coming year.

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor