Suez Canal?

The Suez Canal is an artificial waterway 120 nautical miles long in northeastern Egypt, connecting Port Said on the Mediterranean to Port Tewfik on the Red Sea. Since its completion in 1869, it has been the world's primary passage for maritime traffic between Europe and Asia, shortening the voyage by thousands of miles compared to transit around the Cape of Good Hope.

For the Union of Soviet Sovereign States, the Suez Canal's importance lies in the movement of oil. The Union's vast petroleum reserves lie in Siberia and the western Kazakh Sovereign Republic; the Black Sea and Caspian export terminals are the closest deep-water routes to markets in Europe and the Mediterranean. Transit through the Suez Canal is the quickest overland route—by pipeline or by rail—from the Union's oil fields to the Mediterranean and from there to the Atlantic shipping lanes that supply North America and West Africa.

After the August Emergency and the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, the Union's access to foreign credit became limited. Mikhail Gorbachev and his successors sought outlets for hard currency, and oil sales through the Mediterranean became a priority. The Union rouble's instability after 1998 made export earnings in foreign currency essential; Egyptian passage fees charged in dollars were a substantial cost. The Union Rouble crisis forced the Union to rationalize its export routes and cut transaction costs wherever possible. A pipeline running south from Tyumen and existing terminals on the Caspian could theoretically carry oil to the Persian Gulf, but those routes cross unfriendly territory and require agreements with Iran, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. The Mediterranean route, however circuitous, remained the least politically constrained.

From 1992 onward, Union tanker traffic through the canal increased as a consequence of Western economic isolation. Oil sales to China after the Blagoveshchensk Framework of 2005 actually decreased direct Mediterranean transit—Chinese refineries are closer to Siberian oil by rail and pipeline, reaching the Pacific more directly than the Suez route—but European and African markets continued to depend on the canal passage. By 2014, the Union was among the world's top ten users of the waterway for bulk cargo, though it ranked behind the United States, Japan, and China in overall tonnage.

Egypt controls the canal and collects passage fees from all traffic; the waterway has been designated an international passage by the Constantinople Convention of 1888, which remains in force. Control is managed by the Suez Canal Authority, established under Egyptian sovereignty in 1956. After the Camp David Accords of 1978, Egypt's alignment with the West created an asymmetry for the Union: the canal could not be seized or blockaded without international consequence, but its Egyptian operator remained bound by Western-aligned strategic interests. The Union never mounted a credible threat to the waterway, and Egypt charged the Union the same passage fees as any other shipper. Still, the dependence rankled Soviet and then Union strategists. For three decades after 1992, the canal remained a chokepoint in Union energy security, indirectly tying Union oil exports to Egyptian neutrality and international law.

The Tyumen Compact of 2014 increased the Siberian republics autonomy over oil and gas exports. Direct sales to Turkmenistan and Central Asian republics through shorter routes gained priority, and some fraction of Siberian output was redirected toward China by rail rather than toward European markets by tanker. This modestly reduced Union dependence on the canal, though Mediterranean sales remained significant. By the 2020s, however, climate change was forcing shipping to consider alternative routes. Arctic passages through the Russian Sovereign Republic's northern waters remain unreliable and politically controlled, but seasonal summer transit became possible in some years. The Suez Canal's long-term importance to Union exports may decline if Arctic navigation becomes viable, though that transition is still uncertain.

The Union never negotiated a separate agreement with Egypt on passage fees or priority scheduling. Its oil exports move through the canal as merchant traffic under international law. This ordinary status is partly a consequence of the Union's marginal position in global shipping and partly the result of explicit Egyptian policy to treat all shipping equally, a principle established during the Cold War and reaffirmed afterward. The canal remains crucial to Union energy strategy, but the relationship is one of payment for service rather than diplomacy or negotiation.

In 2021, the cargo ship Ever Given became wedged across the canal, blocking traffic for six days. The Union's petroleum traffic during the blockade was rerouted by smaller tankers through older Mediterranean terminals and stored in floating depots off Malta. The incident cost the Union an estimated fifty million dollars in demurrage and loss of sale timing. It illustrated both the canal's centrality to Union export routes and the vulnerability that such dependence creates.