European market participants see the prospect of developing additional railway infrastructure in the direction of Ukraine even after the war
At the RailFreight Summit 2022 forum, which was held in Warsaw on September 7-8, the organizers of the event asked the participating companies whether they consider it a waste of time and money to create new rail connections with Ukraine, given that the war will end someday? To which the vast majority of respondents expressed their disagreement with this position.
As TTS reports, the question was raised during the speech of one of the representatives from Ukraine - the general director of Levada Cargo - a subsidiary of "Lemtrans" - Volodymyr Demenko.
It turned out that only 5 of the surveyed companies fully or partially believe that the new railway infrastructure in the direction of Ukraine will become unnecessary after the end of the war. However, 36 participants expressed the opposite point of view.
As Dominic Landa (HHLA) noted, the rail freight industry must accept the fact that the new reality of logistics will remain after the war. He said that even when the war is over, cargo flows could take years to return to Russia's Baltic ports, such as St. Petersburg.
Bartholomew Felchynskyi, who represented the DCT Gdansk container terminal, said that his company already takes into account the factor of Ukraine's integration into Europe in its expansion plans: "We are planning our expansion not only to the Polish market, but also to the wider market of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine".
In turn, in his speech, Volodymyr Demenko noted that to increase the capacity of the railway in the Ukraine-EU direction, new border terminals, investments in European port infrastructure, additional wagons, containers are needed. "All these are quite large investments. But a significant volume of transportation will remain on these transport corridors even after the end of the war," he said.
In general, the report of the general director of Levada Cargo "Trade and transport during the war" concerned the key challenges, limitations, as well as opportunities that arise on the overland railway corridor Ukraine-Poland. Thus, according to him, the company's team discovered simple things to increase the volume of cross-border transportation, which can be implemented today and which do not require significant investments: "For example, the system of quotas in EU ports for Ukrainian cargoes, quick passage of control procedures at the borders, increased coordination transportation process with EU countries, improvement of technological processes, etc.".
We will remind that even before the beginning of the Russian invasion, Levada Cargo, as part of "Lemtrans", and the company "Rail Trans Investment" would startconstruction of the intermodal terminal "Mostyska" near the Ukrainian-Polish border.