Translated with AI assistance
The Northern Sea Route is set to break a new record in 2026: transit shipments will exceed 7 million tons – almost twice as much as the previous year. According to Rosatom’s forecast, total cargo traffic along the route will surpass 40 million tons for the first time. The next milestone is the transition to regular year-round navigation, which the corporation expects as early as the beginning of 2027. Vladimir Panov, Director of Rosatom’s Arctic Directorate, told this to Interfax.
The container segment is growing the fastest. In 2026, the number of transit container flights is expected to roughly double to 46, while the volume of international container transit will exceed 600,000 tons.
One of the main drivers is China. This year, the Chinese company Sea Legend Shipping began testing a regular container service between China and Europe via the Russian Arctic. Rosatom issued transit permits for seven vessels, and the program envisions eight voyages during the summer-autumn navigation season. In 2025, the first such voyage from China to Felixstowe in the UK took 20 days, whereas the route through the Suez Canal would have taken about 37 days.
Year-round operations should eliminate the NSR’s main limitation — seasonality. Rosatom expects that in early 2027, one of Russia’s largest shippers will begin regular shipments of goods to Asia, thereby effectively launching permanent traffic along the eastern route.
The Northern Sea Route also has an ally that cannot be built with government funds – a changing climate. Since 2006, the Arctic has been warming more than twice as fast as the global average. In March 2025, the winter sea ice extent reached its minimum in the 47-year history of satellite observations, while the area of the oldest and thickest ice – over four years old – shrank by more than 95% compared to the 1980s. Ice thickness is also declining – by the end of summer 2025, the Arctic ice extent was 28% smaller than in 2005. NOAA explicitly notes that changes in ice extent and thickness are already contributing to increased maritime traffic in the Arctic.
At the same time, the Northern Sea Route itself is gradually becoming part of a larger project – the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor running from St. Petersburg and Murmansk across the Arctic to Vladivostok and further into Asia. It is expected to include not only maritime routes, but also associated railways, inland waterways, and ports.
And although the Northern Sea Route is still far from matching the scale of southern maritime routes and remains more complex and expensive to operate, the nearly twofold growth in transit and the first regular container services show that its role is gradually changing: from a route serving primarily Russian Arctic projects, it is turning into a seasonal alternative for some cargo moving between Asia and Europe. The next test for this model is year-round navigation.
