The TRIPP (Zangezur) Corridor no longer looks like just another road or transport line. If it manages to tie together the countries of Central Asia, American companies and the South Caucasus into a single transit system, its economic and political weight will grow considerably. Official documents name one of the project's main goals as opening up new transit routes from Central Asia across the Caspian and on to Europe.

More and more countries are showing serious interest in the Zangezur corridor. Uzbekistan is one of them, and Tashkent has gone as far as setting up a separate working group to study whether the country could take part in building the railway running from Nakhchivan toward Türkiye. According to the country's transport minister Ilhom Makhkamov, for now this is only an assessment of the project, but ministries are already looking into it. He also noted that after President Shavkat Mirziyoyev's foreign trips, instructions were handed down on several fronts. Among them are the use of Caspian infrastructure, the purchase of ferries and possible equity participation in railway construction on Azerbaijani territory. Each of these questions is being handled by its own group.

The reason behind all this activity is fairly obvious. Uzbekistan needs to ship more and more goods to foreign markets. The more industrial and agricultural products the country sells, the more it cares about the cost and reliability of delivery. Taking part in the project creates the conditions for pushing Uzbek goods more actively onto European and Middle Eastern markets through multimodal routes, and for drawing in foreign partners to handle processing, storage and transport.

Uzbekistan's minister of investment, industry and trade Laziz........

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