Raisi referred to the meeting of the heads of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member countries, who highlighted the importance of the Chabahar port, which is designed to connect the Central Asian region with international waters, the report said.
On June 26, Hojatollah Abdolmaleki, the secretary of the Iranian Supreme Council of Free Trade-Industrial and Special Economic Zones, told Sputnik that Tehran and Moscow planned to sign a memorandum on establishing free economic zones in the Iranian seaports of Anzali and Chabahar, as well as in Moscow and the port of Lotus in Russia's Astrakhan Region.
Abdolmaleki added that Russian entrepreneurs were interested in working on free economic zones both in Anzali, located near the Caspian Sea in northern Iran, and in Chabahar, located in southern Iran on the coast of the Arabian Gulf, with a view to using them for goods transportation via the INSTC from the Indian Ocean.
The INSTC is an international multi-mode network nearly 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers) long, connecting Russia's St. Petersburg and India's Mumbai. The corridor is an alternative to the sea route connecting Europe, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean countries via the Suez Canal. There are three routes, namely, the Trans-Caspian (using railways and ports), Western and Eastern (land routes).