> the donbass, and specifically the part right at the russian border, is key to this project. if you look at a topographical map you'll see why, there's a bigass mountain chain that stops there and it's like a little keyhole doorway between central asia/caucasus and europe. the caucuses negate everything you said here. even if the plan is to multimodal up to that region using ships, you have to remember that multimodal is expensive, slow, and pretty much guarantees cartel/smuggling becomes a huge regional problem.
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