Beyond Hormuz: Russia’s Ambitious Railway Link to India Takes Shape

For centuries, the fastest way to move goods between Russia and India has been by sea—around chokepoints, through straits, past navies that could, on any given week, decide to make life difficult. Now Moscow wants to try something that sounds almost old-fashioned: a train.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin has proposed exploring a rail link from Russia to the Indian Ocean, arguing that alternative routes could help reduce the risks posed by chokepoints such as the Bosphorus and the Strait of Hormuz. Khusnullin said Moscow should examine a railway connection through Central and South Asia, opening an alternative trade corridor towards the Indian Ocean.

The idea, on paper, is simple. The execution is anything but.

A Route Through Hard Country

A potential corridor could run through Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, eventually connecting Russia with India. Khusnullin has not committed to a single path; he said, “Any options providing access to India are acceptable.”

That flexibility is telling. Every single option on the table runs through a country currently under Western sanctions, at war, in political flux, or locked in decades-old hostility with India. Iran has been isolated economically since 1979. Afghanistan is governed by the Taliban and has almost no functioning rail network to speak of. Pakistan and India have fought wars and do not share a functioning trade relationship, let alone open border infrastructure. Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most closed states.

The proposed route would have to navigate difficult geography, infrastructure gaps, and complex geopolitical relationships before ever reaching India, and the statement so far offers no construction plan, cost estimate or timeline.

Why Now

The timing is not accidental. The proposal follows US and Israeli strikes on Iran that led to retaliatory attacks and a maritime blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Tehran. Add to that the long-running fragility of the Bosphorus, squeezed by the Russia-Ukraine war, and Moscow’s calculus becomes clearer: if the sea keeps getting more dangerous, look to land.

Russia has spent the past several years hunting for ways around Western sanctions and the maritime infrastructure that Western navies still largely dominate. A rail corridor that never touches a strait a Western warship could patrol is, geopolitically, a very different kind of trade route.

Khusnullin also noted separately that Russia’s construction industry has the capacity to absorb roughly one trillion additional rubles per year in funding.

Not Exactly Starting From Zero

This is not Russia’s first attempt at reaching India by land. Russia and Iran signed a deal in 2023 to build the Rasht-Astara railway, a roughly 100-mile link along the Caspian coast meant to form part of the International North-South Transport Corridor connecting India, Iran, Russia and Azerbaijan by rail and sea. Putin himself called it part of a “unique” north-south artery designed to diversify global trade flows, while his Iranian counterpart called the deal a strategic step in Tehran-Moscow cooperation.

That corridor, still incomplete, is multimodal—trains, ports and ships stitched together rather than a single unbroken track. Khusnullin’s new proposal is more ambitious: an overland spine reaching all the way to India, sidestepping the sea almost entirely.

The View From Delhi

For India, the appeal is obvious, and the caution is louder. Diversifying away from a single vulnerable strait is a strategic good in the abstract. But the practical route on offer runs straight through Pakistan—a country India shares no open trade corridor with—and Afghanistan, whose instability India has spent two decades trying to manage from a safe distance. Analysts following the proposal have already flagged that India is unlikely to compromise on Pakistan policy or wade deeper into Afghan uncertainty for the sake of a railway, however useful the destination.

There is also a quieter question hanging over the whole idea: why build a new corridor from scratch when Russia and India already run a functioning sea route between Vladivostok and Chennai? For now, that maritime link remains the far more realistic option—expandable, already operational, and not dependent on four separate governments agreeing to lay track through some of the world’s most contested terrain.

A Proposal, Not A Project

Strip away the geopolitics, and what remains is an idea still at its earliest stage: no feasibility study, no financing plan, no agreement from any of the four transit countries. Current reporting indicates the plan remains at the proposal and feasibility-discussion stage, with no confirmed construction schedule.

Whether it ever becomes track and gravel or simply fades into the long list of unrealised Eurasian mega-corridors, the proposal says something real about where global trade is heading. As chokepoints from the Bosphorus to Hormuz grow more unpredictable, nations are rethinking the routes they have relied on for a century, and increasingly, they are looking not at the water, but at the map.