Trade Through the Caucasus Sixfolded in Three Years. Georgia — the Corridor's Only Gateway to Europe — Is Turning Away From the EU That's Building It.

Cargo throughput on the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR, the 'Middle Corridor') expanded from 0.6–0.8 million tonnes a year in 2019–2021 to more than 4.5 million tonnes in 2024 — a more than sixfold rise in three years — with the Caspian Sea crossing alone up over 63% year-on-year to 4.1 million tonnes. The momentum has continued into 2026: Azerbaijan Railways carried 350 China-origin block trains in the first eleven months of 2025, up 34% year-on-year, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway — upgraded to 5 million tonnes of annual capacity after reconstructing its Georgian section — entered full commercial operation on 2 June 2026, Xinhua reported, following completion of the bogie-changing terminal that lets trains cross between the region's different rail gauges without unloading. On the financing side, the EU and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had pledged over €10 billion through the Global Gateway initiative for Central Asian and Caucasus transport connectivity by late 2025, with further money earmarked since specifically for the Middle Corridor.

The structural driver is the war: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions regime made routing China–Europe freight through Russia both a compliance risk and, increasingly, a reputational one, and the Middle Corridor is the one established alternative that avoids Russian territory entirely. The EU's interest compounds two separate anxieties — reducing dependence on Russia, and reducing dependence on the Suez Canal / Red Sea maritime route — which is why Global Gateway money has followed, formalised at a Luxembourg summit with Central Asian and Caucasus leaders in October 2025. The most acute recent driver was more sudden: BTK's weekly freight traffic rose 35% in a single week in March 2026 as the US–Iran war disrupted shipping and trade patterns in the wider region, sending cargo looking for a landlocked detour. None of this required the Caucasus states to do anything except be in the right place — the corridor's boom so far is substantially a function of what shippers are avoiding, not yet of the corridor's own capacity or reliability.

The Carnegie Endowment's Russia-Eurasia programme put the scale question plainly in April 2026: the Middle Corridor handles roughly 6% of the annual 100-million-tonne capacity of the Russian 'Northern Corridor' it is positioned to replace, and growth has exposed rather than resolved the route's bottlenecks — infrastructure gaps, governance friction and geopolitical risk stretch transit times to 40 days or longer in some cases, against a straightforward maritime alternative that is often faster even with its own disruptions. Georgia is the corridor's only sea gateway to Europe, and its existing port capacity is nearing exhaustion — which is why Anaklia, a planned deep-water port on Georgia's Black Sea coast, matters so much. A Chinese consortium led by China Communications Construction Company had held a 49% stake in the project since 2024, but on 6 July 2026 Georgia's economy minister announced the consortium had exited; the state will now develop Anaklia itself under a 'landlord' model, retaining ownership of the core infrastructure and inviting Middle Corridor countries — Azerbaijan named specifically, not Western partners — to operate terminals. The government's own transport strategy now targets $7 billion in combined investment (Anaklia, rail modernisation, highways) by 2032, with the port's first operations not expected before 2029. World Bank and Asian Development Bank projections still foresee the corridor's total volume roughly tripling by 2030 — but that forecast assumes the bottlenecks get funded and finished, and the port that was meant to relieve the biggest one just changed owners.

Azerbaijan is the corridor's biggest near-term winner on two fronts — 350 China-origin block trains in eleven months as the route's logistics anchor, and now a named invitation to invest in Anaklia's terminals after China's consortium withdrew, on top of the Southern Gas Corridor leverage it already holds running its own gas to the EU in parallel. Georgia's gain is more contested, discussed below. For outside powers: the EU gets a trade lane that answers two dependencies at once (Russia and the Suez chokepoint) and has put its money where that logic is with billions in Global Gateway pledges. China's position has actually receded at the corridor's single most strategic asset — its consortium's exit from Anaklia leaves its overland stake in the Middle Corridor resting on rail freight volumes rather than port ownership. Russia is the one actor with an unambiguous interest in the corridor failing — it loses transit fees and a lever of regional control it has held for two centuries — and reporting from the region has raised the question of whether Moscow is quietly working to slow the corridor's development rather than simply losing the business gracefully. Iran, bordering both Armenia and Azerbaijan, has its own transit ambitions and is wary of a Turkic-aligned corridor running along its northern frontier.

Georgia occupies the position every Middle Corridor map depends on — the only land gateway from the Caucasus into EU territory — at the exact moment its own relationship with the EU has fractured. Prime Minister Kobakhidze's government announced in November 2024 that it would suspend EU accession activities until 2028; the EU formally suspended Georgia's accession process the following month. Mass protests followed and, per Human Rights Watch's February 2026 World Report, have continued into 2026 alongside a government crackdown that includes a 'foreign agent' law — modelled on Russia's — requiring any NGO receiving more than 20% of its funding from abroad to register, a threshold that catches most of Georgia's civil-society and rule-of-law organisations, which draw roughly 90% of their funding externally. Brussels' Global Gateway money keeps arriving anyway, because the corridor's logic (bypass Russia, hedge Suez) does not depend on Tbilisi's domestic politics — but the two tracks running in opposite directions, EU cash flowing in while EU-accession trust flows out, is not a contradiction this analysis can resolve. It is the fault line to watch, not a settled outcome.