Ladies and gentlemen, friends.
I am delighted to offer warm greetings to all the participants and guests of the 9th Eastern Economic Forum.
It has become a tradition for Russia and the city of Vladivostok to host this event in early September, bringing together businesses, technology providers, research teams, senior executives from major corporations, government officials, specialists, experts and entrepreneurs who are interested in Russia’s Far East and recognise the immense opportunities this unique Russian region offers for launching creative undertakings and engaging in mutually beneficial partnerships.
As you know, and as our moderator Aleksandra pointed out, we have designated the development of the Far East as a national priority for the 21st century. The significance and correctness of that decision have been confirmed by life itself, the challenges we have recently encountered and, most importantly, the objective trends that are gaining momentum in the global economy, when the main business ties, trade routes and the overall development are increasingly shifting towards the East and the Global South.
Our Far Eastern regions offer direct access to these growing emerging markets, helping us overcome the barriers which some Western elites are trying to create worldwide. The most important thing, as I have already mentioned, is that the Far East is a huge area for implementing business initiatives, launching complex projects and creating whole new industries.
This subject – the image of our future – is the key focus of nearly 100 events, panel sessions and roundtable discussions at the Eastern Economic Forum. Overall, representatives of more than 75 countries and territories are taking part in the forum’s events.
It is extremely important that such discussions are complemented with substantive business dialogues and result in the adoption of investment decisions and trade agreements. I would like to say that over a thousand agreements worth in total more than 10.5 trillion rubles were signed during the previous three forums.
In fact, the Far East has become a crucial factor for strengthening Russia’s standing in the world and our flagship in the new global economic reality. The further development of the Far East will largely determine the future of our country as a whole.
In short, the Eastern Economic Forum has rightfully become a respected venue for establishing reliable business contacts and discussing the strategic development of the Russian Far East and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole.
In my address I will tell you about some of our planned actions in this sphere, our proposals for our foreign partners on strengthening investment, trade, industrial and technological cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as about our achievements and plans in the economy, infrastructure and social sphere of the Far East, including for improving the quality of life for our citizens in this region.
Let me remind you that back in 2013 we launched a new strategic programme and a governance framework for promoting comprehensive development in Russia’s Far East. And this approach has proven its worth. Over the past ten years, over three and a half thousand manufacturing, infrastructure, technology and educational projects have been launched in this region. Over the same period, fixed capital investment has been gathering momentum in Russia’s Far East, with the growth rate exceeding the national average by a factor of three.
This investment brought about tangible results. There are about 1,000 new enterprises here, and these efforts helped create over 140,000 jobs. In terms of industrial output growth, the region has been above the national average by 25 percent since 2013.
Let me also remind you that there are currently 16 priority development territories in Russia’s Far East. There is also the Free Port of Vladivostok. We introduced a preferential regime for the Kurils, and established a special administrative district on Russky Island – this is where this meeting is taking place. By the way, this district has offered a pathway for re-shoring assets worth over 5.5 trillion rubles back to Russia from offshore and foreign jurisdictions. More than 100 companies are currently registered here.
We will make sure to continue this advancement and will work tirelessly to improve the business environment in Russia in general, as well as in its Far East, including by relying on innovative and effective practices when working with foreign investors.
For example, we announced the initiative to establish international priority development territories in the Far East at the 2023 Eastern Economic Forum. Foreign investors, primarily from the friendly countries, of course, must benefit from a globally competitive environment.
We have plans to establish our first international priority development territory here in the Primorye region. Our Chinese partners, as well as the Republic of Belarus, have shown great interest in this undertaking. Belarus could even contribute to building a new deep-water port here. I would like to ask the State Duma and the Government to step up their efforts to draft a law for launching these international priority development territories.
There is another regulatory solution designed to facilitate and expand our ties with our foreign partners. Starting on September 1, 2024, Russian law allows for the use of foreign standards in construction and design. Of course, this applies to countries where quality and safety requirements for permanent structures are just as high as here in Russia. I hope that this approach serves its purpose, including within the Far East’s international priority development territories.
Developing Bolshoi Ussuriysky Island in the Khabarovsk region should serve as a model for working with our foreign partners, attracting investment in construction projects and creating jobs. This project provides for creating major logistics centres and border checkpoints, as well as expanding its road network.
Last May, during the state visit to the People’s Republic of China, we agreed to collaborate with our Chinese colleagues on this project. I am certain that it will provide a good powerful impetus to the development of Khabarovsk and the entire region. I am asking the Government to finalise all the organisational and financial issues in order to begin fulfilling this plan as soon as 2025.
Of course, electricity supply is one of the key issues when it comes to launching business initiatives in the processing industry, in housing construction and in transport network upgrade, across all areas, in fact.
The Russian Far East is experiencing an increase in energy consumption. The current rate is 69 billion kilowatt per hour annually, and by the end of the decade, we expect it to be around 96 billion. Even today, there are areas, residential areas and major Far Eastern investors who face the shortage of power and have to wait for the launch of new stations, which delays construction, the operation of industrial facilities and infrastructure.
I have already instructed the Government, our major energy companies and business circles to develop a long-term development programme for energy capacity in the Far East, and work on respective project financing mechanisms.
This programme aims to eliminate the expected deficit of electric energy in the Far East, primarily by launching new generation facilities like, for example, the Nizhne-Zeiskaya hydro power station in the Amur Region, which will not only provide electricity to the region and the Eastern Operating Domain but also help protect territories and residential areas from flooding. I am also asking you to consider building nuclear power plants in the Far East. We discussed this with our colleagues yesterday.
I want to emphasise that the power development plan must consider both current and future needs of businesses and the public, as well as the long-term objectives of the constituent entities, cities and smaller residential areas.
This also applies to strengthening transport and logistics capabilities of the Far East and the entire country. The largest and most significant project here is, of course, the expansion of the Eastern Operating Domain.
In the past ten years, more than 2,000 km of railway tracks have been built and more than 5,000 km have been renovated on the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. We have built and renovated more than 100 bridges and tunnels, including those across the Lena, Bureya and Selenga rivers. By the end of this year, the carrying capacity of the Eastern Operating Domain railway network is expected to reach 180 million tonnes.
This year, we launched the third stage of this highly important transport artery, and the works are currently underway.
I want to emphasise that our objective is to eliminate railway bottlenecks and build over 300 facilities, including routes supplementing the Severomuisky, Kuznetsovsky and Kodarsky tunnels, as well as a bridge across the Amur River. This is a much more ambitious goal. It is crucial to start planning for the future today.For example, we will need to lay a second set of tracks along the entire Baikal-Amur Mainline and electrify this railway.
Over the next eight years, we will lay 3,100 kilometres of tracks along the Eastern Operating Domain. To put this into perspective, this is the same volume of tracks that were laid during the first and second stages of expanding BAM and the Trans-Siberian Mainline combined. This is also comparable to the construction of BAM in 1974−1984.
Today, we are implementing a project whose scale exceeds the largest Soviet-era infrastructure investment project completed by all Soviet republics pooling all their resources.
Just like the Trans-Siberian Mainline, the new transport corridor between St Petersburg and Vladivostok will serve as a vital continental artery.
Expanding freight traffic volumes and improving the quality of vehicle traffic are not the only goals. When completed, the new corridor will also promote inbound tourism: the entire route passes through numerous Russian regions.
The corridor is being developed in stages. In December 2023, we opened a modern motorway between Moscow and Kazan. By late 2024, this route will reach Yekaterinburg and later Tyumen. We will also build bypass roads in Omsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo and Kansk.
In the future, when the modern road reaches Vladivostok, the auto transport corridor will be over 10,000 kilometres long, including routes for accessing checkpoints on the Russian state border.
In this connection, I would like to remind you of the objective set out in the Address to the Federal Assembly, specifically, the reduction of queues at the border and reducing the time in which lorries undergo checks, which should not exceed ten minutes.
We aim to achieve this result at the first five Far Eastern border checkpoints by 2026. It is worth noting that railway checkpoints are already processing freight at the border promptly.
Let me stress this: a truly large-scale effort has been launched at both the Eastern Operating Domain’s railway network and at all of Russia’s major road infrastructure facilities. This effort involves specialists, engineers, and designers from many regions of our country. They are proving through their hard work and responsible approach to business that Russia is ready and able to handle large-scale construction projects, and do it quickly and with high quality, and to implement infrastructure and transport projects on a national and global scale.
These projects include the development of the Northern Sea Route as an international logistical route. Over the past decade, the freight traffic flow on this route has increased by an order of magnitude, from just four million tonnes in 2014 to over 36 million tonnes last year. This is 400 percent more than the Soviet-time record.
We will continue to boost the freight traffic, including by developing actively Arctic deposits, rerouting cargo flows from west to east, and expanding the transit.
The large-scale plan for the development of the Northern Sea Route is currently being implemented. We are building icebreakers, expanding our satellite cluster in orbit, strengthening the coastal infrastructure, and upgrading the network of emergency and rescue centres. Coastal cruises were launched on the Northern Sea Route two years ago to familiarise ourselves with new logistical routes. Today, this arrangement includes 14 ports in the Northwest, the Arctic, and the Russian Far East.
It is worth noting that the capacity of Russian ports within the limits of the Northern Sea Route exceeded 40 million tonnes at the end of last year. However, we believe that this is just the beginning. We will continue to increase their capacities, upgrade the cargo transshipment mechanism, and expand the nearby and far-off rail approaches to these ports. One of our goals is to increase the capacity of the Murmansk Transport Hub to 100 million tonnes and potentially even higher.
Let me note that our Eurasian integration partners are also interested in developing the Murmansk Transport Hub. For example, the colleagues from Belarus I have mentioned are giving careful consideration to the prospects for expanding the port infrastructure and their terminals on the Kola Peninsula. Of course, we also invite other countries to take part in this project. I know that there is an interest in this work.
Let me add that Russia implements all its transport and logistical initiatives using advanced engineering, digital and environmental solutions. This creates additional demand for the output of Russian machine-building and iron-and-steel plants, and for services of the construction and other industries, research institutions, and hi-tech businesses.
It is with this approach based on the latest solutions and the greatly improved technological, economic and educational capability of the country as a whole, that we must address the tasks of strategic development of the Far East, including the further strengthening of the region’s basic mineral resources sector.
Today, the Far East accounts for 100 percent of the country’s tungsten, tin, fluor spar and tincal production, 80 percent of diamonds and uranium, over 70 percent of silver, and 60 percent of gold. However, mining in the main production areas, including Yakutia and Chukotka, began long ago and their resources are objectively limited, while the demand for them is growing, both for export and on the domestic market.
We must ensure the resource sovereignty of our country and provide a reliable basis for the sustainable supply of affordable raw materials and fuel to the national economy, to our regions, cities and towns, as well as create a foundation for the production of new materials and energy sources. As I mentioned earlier, we must accomplish this by utilising more effective domestic technologies and scientific solutions in the fields of ecology and mineral resources management.
During our forum last year, we instructed the Government to prepare separate programmes for exploring the resources of the Far East and Siberia and to incorporate them into the Geology. Revival of a Legend federal project.
These programmes have been prepared. According to our estimates, every ruble of federal funds invested in exploration will attract at least 10 rubles of private investment. But the main thing is that these investments will pay back and produce a huge profit, as well as have a comprehensive effect throughout the production chain. However, this job must be completed within the given timeframe and with due regard for the investment planning horizon.
I ask the Government to include the funding of these programmes in the draft three-year federal budget in the amounts necessary for achieving our goals.
As I said, the Far East has the potential to increase the state of geological exploration severalfold, including when it comes to the exploration for and production of high-tech raw materials such as titanium, lithium, niobium and rare earth metals, which we will need for the economy of the future. Most importantly, we have all these elements.
These industries have a huge potential for the growth of our Far Eastern regions, for creating jobs, enhancing the availability of various services, strengthening ties and improving logistics efficiency.
We will support the development of innovative and creative industries, and the infrastructure for the big data and AI economy in the Far East. In particular, we will establish a zone here where civilian purpose drones will be created.
We will continue to build up the scientific and educational potential of the Far East so as to use the advantages of technological progress to full capacity. New projects to build university campuses in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Khabarovsk have been launched in the region, but this is clearly not enough for the Far East.
I propose launching several more projects, namely, to build new campuses in Ulan-Ude, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Chita. We will also complete the second phase of the campus at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. These campuses will have all the necessary conditions for study, work and accommodation of the students, as well as youth entrepreneurship platforms and business clubs.
We will also upgrade our Arctic universities. The project to build a campus in Arkhangelsk will be followed by a similar project in Murmansk.
Innovative engineering schools will be created at university campuses. Two such schools have already opened in Sakhalin and Vladivostok. Their task is not only to train professionals for our industries, agriculture, transport, the services sector and AI spheres, but also to propose unique solutions for broad implementation in management, the social sphere and economic sectors.
A RusHydro science and technology centre has been functioning efficiently on Russky Island for two years. It is focused on innovative global energy research, and its solutions are being actively used in the retooling and modernisation programme of the energy sector in the Far East.
Our leading companies will contribute to the establishment of another major innovative science and technology center at the Far Eastern Federal University on Russky Island. It will specialize in research and practical solutions in the fields of marine engineering, biotechnology, biomedicine and other promising spheres.
I urge our colleagues in the Government and in the Primorye region to use the Far Eastern concession mechanism for the implementation of that project, as well as to explore ways to attract scientists from other research centers in Russia and other countries to that center. What I have in mind are competitive incentive programs and benefits packages for professionals and their families.