Sectoral round-up: Transport and Logistics Market

Turbulence in global trade and a stronger rouble resulted in fluctuating shipment volumes. According to Rosstat, the federal statistics agency, cargo flows in Russia, net of pipeline, deliveries declined by 1.3 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year. The sector tried coming up with ways of responding to the challenges it faced by streamlining business processes, promoting the digital transformation and focusing on satisfying domestic demand, primarily from e-commerce operators.

Cargo turnover by transport mode in Russia

Source: RZD-Partner

The overall cargo turnover for all modes of transport in 2025 was equal to about 8.1 billion tonnes. According to Rosstat, this volume stayed approximately at the same level as during the previous year. However, there was a structural shift with more deliveries carried out by motor roads and by sea and a decline in other sectors, including shipments by rail, rivers and air.

Cargo shipments in Russia

Source: RZD-Partner

Railway shipping: Developing infrastructure in new directions

Container shipments within the Russian Railways (RZD) network decreased by 4.1 percent in 2025 compared to 2024 to 7.6 million TEUs with experts pointing to weaker domestic demand as the reason for this decline. The Eastern Operating Domain continued to be overloaded with shipments within this section dominated by coal exports and imports of goods from China. Delays in the movement of trains resulted in higher logistics costs and longer delivery times.

Annual container shipments within the RZD network, million TEUs

Source: InfraNews

Freight rates decreased, which forced operators to adjust their own costs and adopt multimodal schemes. The trend of delivering more shipments by road at the expense of rail transport remained in place for almost all main corridors, including long-distance deliveries, which used to be dominated by rail considering its ability to offer a lower price tag for long-distance deliveries.

There were also positive trends which can help restore railway shipping volumes:

• Container shipments through the border with Kazakhstan increased — this corridor reinforces the EAEU’s ties with Central Asia and offsets declines in other operating domains;

• RZD has a big investment programme for 2026 with a focus, among other things, on removing bottlenecks within the rail network;

• New tariff discounts in several sections, primarily along the routes within the North-South international corridor.

According to a forecast by experts from the Institute for Transport Economics and Development (ITED), rail container shipments are expected to continue growing and could reach 8 million TEUs in 2027, up 5.3 percent compared to 2025. This indicator could further increase by a factor of 1.5 and fall within the range of 10 to 12 million TEUs by 2035.

Overall, market players believe that the share of containerised shipments is set to increase for the Russian economy. Today, containers account for about 5 percent of shipments, but this indicator is expected to reach 25 to 40 percent, putting Russia in the same league with developed countries. The annual growth rate for container shipments will be between 1 and 2 percent, driven by global and domestic economic processes and could reach the range of 15 to 20 percent of RZD’s overall shipments in 2032-2035.