The Carnegie Endowment published a rigorous assessment of the Middle Corridor this week that cuts against the dominant narrative. The argument is not that the corridor is failing — the growth figures are real. The argument is that the growth figures are being misread.
The numbers: cargo volume across the Caspian segment rose more than 63% year-on-year in 2024, reaching 4.1 million tonnes, up from 500,000 tonnes before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Georgian port throughput at Poti and Batumi suggests the trend continued in 2025. Container traffic was expected to grow further in 2026 even before the Hormuz closure — the closure has accelerated that growth sharply.
The corridor handles about 6% of the Northern (Russian) Corridor's annual capacity of 100 million tonnes. The gap is not closing fast enough to matter at scale.
The structural constraints are not primarily political. They are infrastructure. The Anaklia deep-sea port in Georgia — the corridor's most critical missing piece on the Black Sea — remains stalled. Without Anaklia, cargo reaching Georgia must move through Poti and Batumi, ports not designed for the container volumes now being demanded. The BTK upgrade (June 2, 5 million tonnes annual rail capacity) addresses the Georgian rail segment but not the port bottleneck.
A second constraint the Carnegie paper identifies: Chinese disinterest. Beijing has made BRI investments in the Northern Corridor and in direct sea routes. The Middle Corridor competes with both. China has no strong incentive to shift cargo to a route it does not control and which bypasses its preferred logistics partners. EU enthusiasm for the corridor as a strategic alternative to Russia does not automatically translate into Chinese shippers choosing it.
The United States has recently focused on a variant — the TRIPP route through Armenia — partly as a workaround for Georgia's current political difficulties. The Armenian election result (Civil Contract, 54%) removes one uncertainty from that route's political feasibility.
CAW position
The Middle Corridor is genuinely important and genuinely constrained. The BTK upgrade, Aktau port investment, and Cyprus connectivity discussions CAW has been tracking are all real and consequential. The Carnegie paper is a useful corrective to corridor boosterism — the infrastructure gaps are real, the Chinese logistics calculus is unfavourable, and the Anaklia stall is a serious problem. The June 23 high-level meeting will be the next test of whether political momentum translates into capital commitments on the missing links.