This week, the Iranian Railways Administration officially confirmed that construction of the 162 km railway Rasht-Astara will start immediately after completion of land acquisition in its route area. This information has been delivered by Jabbar Ali Zakari, the head of the Iranian Railways Authority, and comes in a context that its creators, the Russian and Iranian governments, signing a €1.6 billion co-financing agreement in 2023, was certainly not expected. Russia is in the midst of military confrontation with Ukraine and subjected to comprehensive Western sanctions. Iran has recently been through its own confrontation with the US and Israel and its cease-fire is still precarious. April 1, 2026, executive contract on construction, planned for the transport forum in Moscow, has not been fulfilled because of the war. But the engineering survey has already resumed. The project is back. The question for Baku is not whether the railway is a good idea. It is what attitude a country in Azerbaijan's specific position should take toward a project being built by its two neighbours under circumstances that have changed dramatically since 2023.

Firstly, let us start with what is true about the Rasht-Astara railway on its own merits. There is an urgent need for the development of the International North-South Transport Corridor, the multimodal transport system linking Northern Europe with the Indian Ocean via Russia, the Caucasus and Iran. Container traffic by the Astara corridor was up 51 percent in the first nine months of 2025 compared to the same period of the previous year. In particular, the traffic of the eastern branch has doubled. The western branch is the shortest one, passing through Azerbaijan and Iran, and it lacked only one element throughout its history: a railway line between Rasht and Astara. Now that the section is built, the freight unit can be delivered from Indian Ocean ports via Iran, across the border of Azerbaijan through Astara by train, northwards through Azerbaijan up to Russia without........

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