Fyodor Soloview, the founder and President of InterBering LLC, a consulting group that strongly advocates the construction of the Bering Strait tunnel, told EIR in a June 9 interview that the Chinese are interested in the Bering Strait tunnel, and that China’s volume of goods shipment could be essential for the tunnel project’s success.
Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and special presidential representative for investment and economic cooperation with foreign countries, stated June 5 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) that he believes that “China could join the [Bering Strait] project.”
Soloview told EIR that the “initial cargo traffic between Russia and the United States is not enough to sustain the cost of building the tunnel. But China could have a lot of cargo that goes to the United States, some of which goes by ship. Not only Chinese goods, but China can ship goods from North and South Korea, Vietnam, etc. Shipping goods by rail rather than ship traffic would be a cheaper means for those countries.”
A logical gathering point for that cargo, Soloview said, is Harbin, the industrial hub of China’s far-northeastern Heilongjiang province. One place that the cargo from China and other countries could cross into Russia would be at Heihe, China, which is across the Amur River (called the Heilongjiang River in China) from the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk. In 2022, the Russians and Chinese built a highway bridge connecting Heihe and Blagoveshchensk. They also built a railway bridge across a different portion of the Amur River connecting Nizhneleninskoye in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast with Tongjiang in China’s Heilongjiang province. Soloview identified other additional places where Chinese cargo could pass into Russia.
