SEOUL, August 06 (AJP) - Construction began Monday on an 800-kilometer highway across western Kazakhstan that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said will connect crossings on the Chinese border directly to the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, giving trucks a direct route onto the trade corridor Europe has been funding as an alternative to shipping through Russia.
Tokayev launched the project by video link from Astana along with two other road schemes. He said the new highway would shorten the freight route between China and Europe by 1,000 kilometers and cut delivery times to three days, and proposed naming it the Aral-Caspian Highway.
The road runs from Beineu in Mangystau region to Sekseuil, the settlement on the northeastern edge of the Aral basin that Kazakh officials and state media still commonly call by its Soviet-era name, Saksaulsk. Tokayev told the broadcast the highway would function as a "golden bridge" between China and Europe.
Work also started on capacity expansion and reconstruction of the Kyzylorda to Sekseuil and Ulgaysyn to Sekseuil highways, 774 kilometers between them. Kazakh companies will carry out the projects, creating more than 10,000 jobs, and freight traffic on the three roads is expected to rise 2.5 times to 13.2 million tons a year once they open. Tokayev set a completion deadline of 2029.
The corridor the roads feed is formally the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, generally called the Middle Corridor. It links western China to Europe through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian Sea by rail ferry, then through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye, bypassing Russian territory.
Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport says freight along the route has risen more than fivefold in seven years, from 800,000 tons to 4.5 million tons a year, with about 77,000 twenty-foot equivalent units moved in 2025. The ministry expects container traffic to reach 300,000 units by 2029.
The World Bank assessed the corridor in 2023 and set out the investments and policy changes it said could triple freight volumes and halve travel times by 2030, alongside a diagnostic of infrastructure and logistics constraints in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Those constraints are the reason the route still moves a fraction of what the northern rail line through Russia once carried.
The Beineu road has been on the European Union's list for some time. EU Ambassador to Kazakhstan Aleška Simkić told a Trans-Caspian corridor coordination workshop in Astana on June 3 that the bloc's 30 million euro transport support programme covers modernization of Aktau port facilities and preparatory work for the full modernization of the Beineu to Sekseuil road.
Financing is still being arranged. The prime minister's office said international financial institutions and the Development Bank of Kazakhstan are running tender procedures for the Beineu, Kyzylorda and Ulgaysyn road projects, which are to use domestic materials and local specialists. Neither the presidential press service nor the government has published a total cost.
Tokayev first proposed the Beineu road in 2021 at a meeting in Aktau, and technical studies, feasibility assessments and the identification of funding sources followed, first deputy chief of the presidential executive office Erlan Karin said, according to Kazakhstan's state news agency Qazinform. Karin said the route will be built through territory where no road previously existed, and that Kazakhstan's main transport lines have historically run north to south.
Tokayev used the launch to set out the wider road program. Eight international corridors cross Kazakhstan carrying about 35,000 vehicles a day, road freight volumes have doubled in five years, and the sector earned 1.5 trillion tenge, about $3.2 billion, last year. Some 13,000 kilometers of road were built or repaired in 2025 and 6,000 kilometers opened to traffic.
Kazakhstan is modernizing 37 road border checkpoints by 2028, with construction under way at 14 of them. Tokayev said the checkpoint overhaul would be the first of its kind since the country became independent in 1991.
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AJP Takeaways
● Kassym-Jomart Tokayev launched construction of an 800-kilometer highway from Beineu to Sekseuil that he said will connect Chinese border crossings directly to the Caspian ports of Aktau and Kuryk, shortening the China to Europe freight route by 1,000 kilometers and cutting delivery times to three days.
● Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport says freight along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, known as the Middle Corridor, has risen more than fivefold in seven years to 4.5 million tons a year, and expects container traffic to reach 300,000 twenty-foot equivalent units by 2029.
● The prime minister's office said international financial institutions and the Development Bank of Kazakhstan are still running tender procedures for the three road projects, and no total cost has been published by either the government or the presidential press service. Aju Press assembled this from government tender disclosures, which were absent from the launch announcement.
● The European Union has been funding preparatory work on the same road through its 30 million euro Trans-Caspian transport support programme, EU Ambassador Aleška Simkić said in Astana on June 3.
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